The Rhetoric of the Digital Image

(A Reading in Receiving The (COVID-19) Pandemic)

Abstract

It is no secret that Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic has power over the world, which, although transformed into a small village in several respects at the time of its globalization, has become almost unified on all levels in a frightening way that amazed the world, and that was clearly evident in the several cartoons describing the latest situations, because it is the closest to keeping up with reality in an explicit or satirical and disguised symbolic way. The creator of the picture marries drawing and linguistic expression to produce a distinctive form in which the significance of reality and the deep intellectual vision that accompanies it are condensed. Caricature is a very ancient art, and it is impossible to determine the date of its appearance. In ancient civilizations, we find that the ancient Egyptians, for example, used it to sarcastically express their true opinion of those in power by drawing of animals or engraving them on stone and pottery. The caricature art was embodying the social, political, economic and other issues of their time, and the Italian artists, Annabal Caraci and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, are considered pioneers of this art for which the linguistic origin of the word "caricature" (which was first used by the Italian artist Mussini in 1646) is derived from the Latin verb (Caricare) which means “a drawing that exaggerates the defects in order to ridicule them”. It is worth mentioning also that world museums have preserved some Greek and Roman products that hint at the significance of irony.

The importance of the study lies in its critical reading of the visual image, aiming to uncover the mechanisms of digital image production in rhetoric and style through different models of the Corona (Covid-19) pandemic related caricature, by searching for the components that make up the visual icon and investigating the connotations of the visual image, and their impact on receiver.