Semiotics of Arts

A Historical Survey

Abstract

The essay identifies the founding moment of Italian semiotics of the image in Omar Calabrese’s book La macchina della pittura. Pratiche teoriche della rappresentazione figurativa tra Rinascimento e Barocco [The Painting System. Theoretical Practices of Figurative Representation between Renaissance and Baroque], published in 1985 (Calabrese 1985a). The book is a meeting point between semiotic methodology applied to the visual and studies in the field of French art theory. In our work, the conceptual and thematic axes focused on by the book are explored alongside the most recent developments in the Italian semiotics of art. The theoretical cornerstones underpinning the discipline include Greimas’s essay Figurative Semiotics and the Semiotics of the Plastic Arts (1984), the concept of art as a “theoretical object”, the concept of visual enunciation and the centrality of the passions in images.