Détournement of Jean-Léon Gérôme's painting Pollice Verso, 1872, from SPUR no 6, August 1961. In Idols of the Market Sven Lütticken writes:
One of the most famous compositions by the academic painter, Pollice Verso depicts vestal virgins gesturing "thumbs down" to a gladiator at the circus, signalling to him to finish off his prostrate opponent. Accompanied by a text by Dieter Kunzelmann that mixes impressions of daily life with Jungian terminology and the author's late-pubescent brand of machismo and hysterical actionism, and robbed of its slick illusionism by having been printed red on colored paper, the work disrupts any lustful, guilty identification with the scene, suggesting a transformation of imperial games into Situationist play.
Oddly, Gérôme's painting is understood to have popularized the gesture "thumbs down" — before this, it seems, it was unclear just what Romans did with their thumbs to signal the gladiator to kill their opponent.