Universal images of universal elements

We furnish several necessary and sufficient conditions for the following property: For a topological space X, a continuous selfmapping S of X and a family τ of continuous selfmappings of X, the image under S of every τ-universal element is also τ-universal. An application in operator theory, where we extend results of Bourdon, Herrero, Bes, Herzog and Lemmert, is given. In particular, it is proved that every hypercyclic operator on a real or complex Banach space has a dense invariant linear manifold with maximal algebraic dimension consisting, apart from zero, of vectors which are hypercyclic.