Looking backward: The rhetoric of the back in a visual satire

Satire can be confronting. It questions all kinds of issues of politics, society and morality,
often from a marginal position. By confronting one issue, the satirist turns his back on others,
leaving the reader or spectator behind. This paper investigates some of the spatial strategies in
visual satire from the early and later modern period, for instance in the work of Giandomenico
Tiepolo and James Gillray, taking a special interest in the rhetoric of the back and the satirical
gaze. It argues that the representation of the backs of onlookers to a scene helps to direct the
satirical gaze.