Communicating Without Words: The Effectiveness and Future of Purely Visual Advertisements

In 2005 Marthe and Francois Girbaud created an advertising campaign that not only differed from any other advertisement released but held the potential to revolutionize the schema of advertising. The advertisement depicts a distorted view of Leonardo da Vinci\u27s Last Supper painting where Christ and the Apostles are replaced by female figures. The campaign is analyzed through the comparison of J. Anthony Blair\u27s article entitled: The possibility and actuality of visual arguments published in Argumentation and Advocacy in 1996. Themes from the original painting are reinterpreted to present not only controversial, but conflicting elements that effectively change the meaning of da Vinci\u27s original piece. This purely visual campaign garnered the attention of the Catholic Church and marketing and fashion industries. Even though the advertisement generated so much attention from the Catholic Church that the institution responded with legal action, the world media gave surprisingly little attention to the advertisement, leaving it up to the researcher to determine its potential success or failure had it been fully released. This rhetorical analysis discusses the Girbaud Last Supper campaign and the ways in which it would have succeeded and failed in influencing both the consumer and the advocate