Metaphor (Visual)

A visual metaphor is a type of metaphor the component elements of which (generally designated topic and vehicle, or target and source) are rendered in visual terms. No unified theory of visual metaphors exists, both because scholars from various disciplines (art historians, philosophers, semiologists, linguists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, etc.) are involved in analyzing them, and because their definition varies based on the more general concept of metaphors of which it is a part. There are, however, several recurring questions: how is a visual metaphor identified? Can we retrace the semiotic-rhetorical strategies or semantic-cognitive processes that are common to both verbal and visual metaphors? Are visual metaphors a specific phenomenon or can they be reduced to linguistic metaphors? Such questions have already received some answers from literature now considered consistent, that – even before pictorial or iconic turns – investigated the rules of the construction and interpretation of visual metaphors in a variety of areas, including art and advertising.