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The 19th century transformed Rabelais’debonair giant Gargantua into the epitome of French satire and wit. At the same time, the figure established itself as a visual matrix for the French social imagination stretching from the French Revolution to the Belle Époque: the character rapidly disenfranchised its visual specificities from their textual origins. The study of a vast corpus of representations including caricatures, paintings, illustrations, press drawings, pub decorations, advertising posters, carnival giants and postcards shows how, regardless of hierarchies and according to a migratory logic, Gargantua’s iconography, based on changes in scale, sustainably grew and developed within both learned and popular culture.