ABSTRACT
The iconography of liberty, as one critic has observed, operates by a ‘series of inversions’. That which is opposite to, or other than, ‘liberty’ comes to stand as a sign of that very quality; and (conversely) figures for liberty incorporate meanings which undermine them. 1 This article offers a brief, and therefore inevitably fragmentary genealogy of the relationship of apparent opposites, ‘luxury’ (an invitation to lust and through chains of association an index of political degeneracy), and ‘liberty’ (implying political virtue, enfranchisement), as they are focused in the gradually naturalized iconography of the female breast during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
