Drie onder één deken (Three Under One Blanket)

This Dutch wood engraving depicts three male figures in bed together under a canopy marked 'ROME,' with their boots discarded below—a visual metaphor for political entanglement over the Roman Question, a crisis involving papal authority, Italian unification, and European powers. The intimate domestic scene transforms public diplomacy into uncomfortable bedfellows, a satirical strategy inherited from 18th-century printmakers like Hogarth and Gillray. The artist exploits the bedroom's private associations to ridicule political compromise and moral discomfort. Such political cartoons in wood engraving and lithography formed a direct lineage to later sequential comics: visual narrative, exaggeration, and symbolic composition deployed to mock current events for literate urban audiences.