Geometrie del senso. Ripensare la semiotica dell’immagine a partire da La macchina della pittura

The contribution intends to retrace the role played by Omar Calabrese in Semiotics of Arts. It’s a subject that was born in the past twenty years of the last century and one that the recently departed researcher has made such deep contributions to precisely design it. The volume La macchina della pittura is certainly his most innovative contribution, the most systematic and still up to date one. In the time it was published – 1985 – it set a double challenge towards art history and semiotics. For the frst one, because it imposed a different kind of regard, capable of decoding the way in which form was built in the pictoric sense. To semiotics because it shows how painting was to produce sense and even contains within itself the mechanisms for interpreting it.