Abstract
This essay draws parallels between contemporary popular visual culture and symbolic marginal sculpture from twelfth-century Saintonge in southwestern France. The Internet image of President Obama in makeup associated with Heath Ledger’s portrayal of The Joker seems to float through popular culture without a definitive meaning, as does the extremely fluid Guy Fawkes’s mask from the film V for Vendetta. These examples from contemporary visual culture remind modern viewers to consider the importance of specific audiences, textual communities or microcultures when assigning meaning. The images’ reception by microcultural groups can inform our interpretation of twelfth-century corbel sculptures, which are equally perplexing due to their creation for a specific community no longer in existence. Far from being meaningless ornaments, corbels carried deep, multivalent and often polemical messages in much the same manner as the contemporary examples discussed here.
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