Painting history: Terra incognita as anti-Leviathan emblem

Abstract

Investigating the composite imagery, visual narration and historical engagement of Penny Siopis's Terra incognita (1991), this study first relates her "history painting" series to its context of origin and to categories in current visual theory. The allusion to William Blake's Nebuchadnezzar in the Siopis painting introduces the critical notion of counter-emblematic strategies of ideological resistance. The title-page emblem of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) is proposed as the emblematic counterpart of Terra incognita. Certain world-historical implications of such counter-imaging are investigated with the object of unearthing deep-seated ambiguities in the visual representation of cosmos and chaos, power and suffering, justice and evil.