Siège de la Colonne de Pompée / Science in the Pillory

James Gillray's hand-coloured etching lampoons Napoleon's Egyptian campaign of 1798–99, specifically the Commission des Sciences et des Arts — the 167 scholars, engineers, and artists accompanying the expedition. Atop Pompey's Pillar in Alexandria, a comic cluster of savants clutch instruments and manuscripts while turbaned figures below feed the flames. Flying debris, a balloon, winged demons, and scattered books fill the sky in Gillray's characteristically crowded compositional chaos. The print sits squarely in the London satirical tradition — Hogarth's moral tableaux, Rowlandson's ribald crowds — that trained audiences to read dense sequential imagery, irony, and visual exaggeration: the direct ancestor of the newspaper comic strip and, eventually, the comic book page.