If there is one thing that generative artificial intelligence is teaching us – even though it is really just reminding us – it is that there is nothing obvious or immediate about the act of looking at images and artificial visual objects in general. Each of these objects, even the most abstract, has its own relationship with reality, and images generated by AI are no exception; it is just that in their case the connection is primarily with that portion of reality which is itself made up of images, each of which, in a more or less mediated way, ultimately refers to one or more of those physical or conceptual entities whose totality is conventionally called “the world.”
To observe an image consciously means precisely trying to unravel this tangle of references that constitutes its “meaning.” This is an operation that requires reconsidering every visual text as a microcosm endowed with an internal structure that acquires significance not only through mimetic references to reality – what Roland Barthes called “denotative meanings” – but also through the relationships that the image establishes at various levels among its constituent elements. This is, after all, the only path to follow if one wishes to pierce the veil of incomprehension and relative mistrust that surrounds “non-figurative” art – that is, abstract or informal art – which still leaves the majority of its viewers puzzled.
To untangle these knots of meaning, often hidden beneath the apparent self-evidence of a perfect mimesis, the first indispensable step is to grant our gaze the time needed to move beyond the instant of “first sight,” and to allow images – and ultimately ourselves – what is necessary to achieve a meaningful aesthetic experience. This is obviously only a necessary condition: to paraphrase Hjelmslev, we might say that the willingness to “take our time” transforms the temporal “matter” into “substance”; the next step is to organise this substance into a “form,” giving it a “discursive” structure that translates the “narrative” carried out by the visual text and renders it accessible to our interpretation.
Visual semiotics is the ideal tool – though not the only one – for establishing the principles of a method to guide our approach to images. It is an approach – or rather an ecosystem of approaches – with a history now approaching seventy years, even though it “has unfolded through various explorations and as many changes of course,” as the author of this valuable Einaudi “map” reminds us. Trajectories that can still disorient anyone who seeks to extract from research papers, essays, manuals, articles, theses, conferences, and seminars what is needed to assemble a toolkit to draw upon when engaging with an image. From the time of De Saussure onwards, every stage has left its traces in contemporary visual semiotics: even the subsequently abandoned attempts to define a visual language along the lines of verbal language – an endeavour to which, among others, Barthes himself devoted considerable effort – have left some legacy to structural and interpretive semiotics.
Unfortunately, the tortuous multidimensionality of the method is not the only inheritance that semiotics owes to its past; perhaps the weightiest is an unappealing obscurity of language, a condescension toward rhetorical contortion, an indulgence in extended and complex sentence structures that has been the hallmark of a large part of Italian and international semiotic writing. Reading an essay by Algirdas Julien Greimas or Louis Marin – and often by Paolo Fabbri and Omar Calabrese as well – is as much an epiphanic experience as it is a demanding undertaking, slowed by a heavy and convoluted line of argument that is not solely the result of the subject matter’s inherent difficulty. The work of Valentina Manchia occupies a current that is perhaps academically marginal, but one that stems from a question semiotics must place on its agenda if it wishes to shed the reputation of an esoteric and obscure discipline that clings to it, sometimes with an apparent air of self-satisfaction: before clarifying the object of discussion, it is necessary to clarify the discussion itself, and to do so as simply as possible – through clear prose born of a genuine concern for the reader’s comprehension.
That this is an achievable goal is demonstrated precisely by the exemplary clarity of this volume, whose introductory register does not prevent it from offering a solid, well-articulated, and substantially complete exposition. It begins by tracing the perimeter and characteristics of semiotic analysis applied to the visible, before moving on to a comparison with other types of approaches – the iconographic/iconological one and that based on the psychology of perception – with which any analysis aspiring to completeness must engage and integrate. A brief history of visual semiotics, divided by decade from the 1960s onwards, provides some contextual background and leads into a description of the method and concepts of visual semiotics that occupies the largest part of the work.
Here the discussion is divided into two parts, devoted respectively to the figurative and the plastic dimension, which correspond to the two major areas of which structural visual semiotics is composed, according to Greimas’s insight. The first takes as its starting point “figures” understood as parts of the image recognisable as objects in the world – an operation that is far from straightforward, and whose most delicate points Manchia highlights, foremost among them the one linked to the gradual nature of figurativity, which is articulated along a “scale of resemblances” ranging from the sketch and the schema to hyperrealistic rendering, a scale whose rungs are necessarily built with varying degrees of the observer’s cultural competence. From here the text moves on to reflect on how the figurative arrangement of an image is always in correspondence with a narrative dimension that the static image can only evoke. All these elements converge toward the definition of the deep meaning of the image, constituted by the “values” that the artefact conveys in the eyes of the beholder. Also included in this section is the question of enunciation, the term by which semiotics designates the production of a text, and the meaning-bearing weight of the traces that such production leaves within the text itself. This is a topic that I believe can in fact be considered present in the plastic dimension as well – “the other visible,” as the author defines it.
This aspect, which foregrounds the organisation of the image in terms of its constituent elements (lines, colours, the reciprocal positions of its components), is probably the one most remote from our common experience as observers, and precisely for this reason it can prove the most illuminating, especially in our engagement with non-figurative art. But it also holds interesting discoveries in the case of explorations of mimetic art, showing how basic organisation can enter into dialogue with the figurative dimension, realising that “semantic density” and “syntactic saturation” which Nelson Goodman identified as two “symptoms of the aesthetic.”
Here, as throughout the work, the exposition unfolds through many examples, both original and drawn from the reference literature on the subject – a confirmation that the semiotic approach is largely a pragmatic one, requiring, beyond theoretical knowledge, a technique that develops and is refined only through autonomous and direct contact with works, starting naturally with those that seem to offer themselves most readily to our analytical gaze
Although the essay is largely devoted to the study of the individual visual text, it cannot avoid confronting the current gluttonous proliferation of images and the extent to which this overexposure modifies our way of looking at them and even the very concept of the image that is taking shape in the culture of this first quarter of the twenty-first century. These are introductory reflections on a subject that has been receiving increasing theoretical attention in recent times, and one that perhaps demands technical competencies calling for a closer dialogue between STEM disciplines and the humanities: in short, what is needed is the founding of an infosemiotics that would allow the study of the meaning of image aggregates based on the images themselves and on the systems developed for their organisation.
As one might reasonably expect from a “first book,” an annotated bibliography at the close offers some indication of what the “second” might look like; among the suggestions, I would recommend to those wishing to go deeper without immediately falling prey to overly abstruse treatments the cited works of Piero Polidoro and Maria Pia Pozzato. The books by Riccardo Falcinelli – Cromorama, Figure, Visus, and in other respects Guardare, Pensare, Progettare – naturally remain a point of reference for those who wish to linger a little longer on the more accessible side with pleasurable and extraordinarily sharp and brilliant reading.
A final note on the editorial realisation: for a text that speaks of images, frequently referring to their chromatic characteristics, the presence of only black-and-white reproductions is certainly a point of weakness. The availability of material online obviously allows the “willing” reader to remedy the shortcoming, but it does not erase a lacuna in an otherwise excellently produced volume, in keeping with the publisher’s tradition.
Valentina Manchia, Dentro l’immagine. Il primo libro di semiotica visiva
2025. Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi. Mappe
pp. XXII – 274
ISBN 9788806266240
English translation based on Claude.ai translation services.