An Analysis of Cultural Icons: A Synecdochic Procedure

Cultural Icons play an essential role in constructing collective identities and passing them on to posterity. They are constructions shared by a society. But they may also drift beyond their original cultural lodgings and thereby establish transcultural careers because they possess a high degree of recognizability. Every branch of culture (architecture, art, music, literature, photography, film, TV, sports, fashion, design, print media, IT) has its own specific Cultural Icons. They are phenomena belonging to high culture as well as to pop and everyday culture. A typology of Cultural Icons shows: Cultural Icons with an immediate physical presence (the Acropolis, the Falconet Monument to Peter the Great); personified Cultural Icons (Joan of Arc, Napoleon, Marilyn Monroe); Cultural Icons relayed by visual media (Che Guevara posters, reproductions of the “Mona Lisa”); Cultural Icons in verbal forms (“Zauberberg/” “Lolita”); acoustic Cultural Icons (The Marseillaise, Beethoven’s fifth symphony); and symbolic Cultural Icons (the menora). One significance for Cultural Icons is their familiarity within a cultural area, the length of time they remain valid (durability of more than one generation) and their reproducibility. Cultural Icons are in the first place images. They reside in the collective memory of large groups of people. Questions that arise from considering these issues are the topic of this paper. It uses a case-study to examine a phenomenon that has condensed into a Cultural Icon—the equestrian monument to Peter the Great in Saint Petersburg. As it refers to a larger cultural context of meaning (Russian history, the history of St. Petersburg, the Petersburg myth, and—last but not least—the “Petersburg text”), the analysis of this visual sign is a synecdochic procedure.