Semiotics in Art: Reading Signs and Symbols in Images (Barthes, Saussure)

In 1957, the French literary theorist Roland Barthes published a book called Mythologies. It was not about art in the conventional sense. It was about wrestling, soap advertisements, Citroen cars, and the face of Greta Garbo. Barthes analyzed these cultural artifacts as systems of signs, showing how a wrestling match communicates ideas about justice and suffering, how a detergent advertisement encodes assumptions about dirt and cleanliness, how Garbo's face functions as a sign of Platonic beauty. The book was a demonstration that everything visible carries meaning, and that meaning can be analyzed systematically. This was semiotics applied to visual culture, and it has shaped how art historians, cultural theorists, and critics read images ever since.

Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols and how they produce meaning. A sign is anything that stands for something else: a word, an image, a gesture, a color, a shape. Semiotics analyzes how signs work, how they relate to what they represent, and how they function within systems of meaning. In art, semiotics examines how paintings, photographs, sculptures, and other visual works communicate through signs. It asks what a particular color, object, or gesture signifies, how that signification is produced, and what cultural codes make it possible.

This entry covers what semiotics is, how it was developed by Ferdinand de Saussure and Roland Barthes, how it has been applied to visual art, and how to use it when looking at a painting or photograph.

What Is Semiotics?

Semiotics rests on a single foundational idea: meaning is not natural but constructed. A red light does not naturally mean "stop." A society has agreed that red means stop, and that agreement is encoded in a system of signs. Semiotics studies these systems. It asks how signs are formed, how they relate to their referents, and how they organize into codes that make communication possible.

The field was founded independently by two thinkers in the early 20th century. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), a Swiss linguist, proposed a science of signs that he called "semiology." Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (1916, published posthumously by his students) introduced the concepts that would define the field. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), an American philosopher, developed a parallel system called "semiotic" that was more complex and categorized signs into three types: icons, indices, and symbols.

Saussure's model of the sign has two parts. The "signifier" is the physical form of the sign: the sound of a word, the shape of a painted object, the color red. The "signified" is the concept that the signifier evokes: the idea of stopping, the concept of a rose, the notion of danger. The relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary in language. There is no natural reason why the sound "tree" should refer to a woody plant. The relationship is conventional, established by usage within a linguistic community. A 2022 study published by De Gruyter examined the Saussurean legacy in art and visual communication, noting that Saussure's Course "laid the preparation for the achievement of structuralism in the late 1950s and mid-1960s and inspired later poststructuralist thinking." Read the study at De Gruyter.

Peirce's model is different. He categorized signs by their relationship to their referent. An "icon" resembles what it represents: a portrait resembles the person depicted. An "index" is causally connected to its referent: smoke is an index of fire, a footprint is an index of a foot. A "symbol" is connected to its referent by convention alone: a flag symbolizes a nation because a society has agreed that it does. Most artworks combine all three types. A photograph is iconic (it resembles its subject) and indexical (light from the subject caused the image on the film). A painting is iconic but less indexical. A religious painting that uses a halo to signify sanctity is symbolic.

Roland Barthes and Visual Semiotics

Barthes (1915-1980) was the thinker who brought semiotics to visual culture. Building on Saussure's structuralism, Barthes explored images as "paroles" (individual utterances) that must be understood in relation to "langue" (the underlying signifying system). His key essays on visual semiotics, written between 1963 and 1971 and collected in Image, Music, Text (1977), analyzed how photographs, films, and advertisements produce meaning.

Barthes's most influential concept for art analysis is the distinction between denotation and connotation. Denotation is the literal, first-order meaning of a sign. A photograph of a dog denotes a dog. Connotation is the second-order meaning that the sign acquires through cultural association. A photograph of a dog in a particular setting, shot in a particular way, connotes loyalty, domesticity, danger, or wildness depending on the cultural codes the viewer brings to it. Barthes argued that denotation is not really separate from connotation. Even the literal recognition of a dog as a dog depends on cultural learning. But the distinction is analytically useful because it separates what the image shows from what the image means.

Barthes also introduced the concept of "myth," which is central to his analysis of visual culture. In Mythologies (1957), Barthes defined myth as a second-order semiotic system. A first-order sign (a photograph of a soldier saluting a flag) becomes the signifier of a second-order sign (the myth of patriotic duty). Myth naturalizes cultural meanings, making them appear universal and inevitable rather than constructed and political. When Barthes analyzed a Paris Match cover showing a Black soldier saluting the French flag, he argued that the image's myth was that French imperialism was a universalizing, egalitarian project. The image denoted a soldier saluting. It connoted French patriotism. Its myth was that colonialism liberates its subjects.

A 2025 article published in Semiotic Review analyzed the semiotic functioning of generative AI images produced by Midjourney and DALL-E, applying Paris School semiotic criteria to study how AI models translate verbal prompts into visual compositions. The research examined plastic categories (eidetic, chromatic, and topological) and visual enunciation, demonstrating that semiotics provides an analytical framework for understanding AI-generated images. Read the study at Semiotic Review.

Semiotics and the History of Art Analysis

Semiotics has roots in older traditions of reading images. Medieval and Renaissance art used elaborate symbolic systems: lilies signified purity, skulls signified mortality, apples signified sin. Erwin Panofsky's iconological method, developed in the 1930s, was a precursor to visual semiotics. Panofsky distinguished three levels of meaning: primary or natural meaning (recognizing objects and events), secondary or conventional meaning (recognizing stories and allegories), and tertiary or intrinsic meaning (understanding the deep cultural values encoded in the work). Panofsky's three levels map roughly onto Barthes's denotation, connotation, and myth.

The structuralist movement of the 1960s and 1970s brought semiotics into art history. The French journal Communications, where Barthes published many of his key essays, became a hub for semiotic analysis of visual culture. The Paris School of semiotics, developed by A. J. Greimas and his followers, provided more rigorous tools for analyzing visual signs. A 2025 book published by De Gruyter brought together multiple aspects of the semiotics of images into a coherent approach based on Greimasian and post-Greimasian theory, covering static images (painting, drawing, sculpture, photography) and dynamic images (cinema, animation, digital games). Read more at De Gruyter Brill.

A 2026 preprint published on arXiv formalized a Peircean computational semiotic theory for evaluating generative art, modeling Human-GenArt Interaction as "cascaded semiosis." The framework revealed that artistic meaning is conveyed through three modes: iconic, symbolic, and indexical. The study found that existing AI art evaluators operate heavily within the iconic mode, remaining "structurally blind" to symbolic and indexical meaning. Read the study at arXiv.

Key Thinkers and Their Contributions

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)

Saussure founded semiology through his lectures at the University of Geneva, collected posthumously in Course in General Linguistics (1916). His key contributions were the concepts of signifier and signified, the arbitrariness of the sign, and the idea that meaning is produced by differences within a system rather than by reference to reality. Saussure's work was the foundation for structuralism, which extended his linguistic model to anthropology, literature, and visual culture.

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)

Peirce developed an independent and more detailed semiotic theory. His classification of signs into icons, indices, and symbols remains the standard framework for analyzing visual signs. Peirce's work was more philosophically grounded than Saussure's and has been particularly influential in art analysis because it distinguishes between signs that resemble their referents (icons) and signs that are causally connected to them (indices), a distinction that matters for photography and painting.

Roland Barthes (1915-1980)

Barthes applied semiotics to visual culture more systematically than any other thinker. His Mythologies (1957) demonstrated that everyday images carry ideological meaning. His essays on photography, particularly "The Photographic Message" (1961) and "Rhetoric of the Image" (1964), analyzed how photographs combine denotation and connotation. His later book Camera Lucida (1980) introduced the concepts of "studium" (cultural, historical interest in a photograph) and "punctum" (the personal, wounding detail that breaks through the studium), which have become standard tools for photographic analysis.

Umberto Eco (1932-2016)

Eco, an Italian semiotician and novelist, extended semiotic theory to cultural phenomena broadly. His A Theory of Semiotics (1976) provided a comprehensive framework for analyzing signs in all media. Eco's work on "open works" (1962) argued that some artworks are structurally designed to permit multiple interpretations, a concept that connects semiotics to reception theory.

Mieke Bal (born 1946)

Bal, a Dutch cultural theorist, applied semiotics to visual art and museum practice. Her work on narrative in visual art, particularly Reading Rembrandt (1991), demonstrated how semiotic analysis can reveal layers of meaning in paintings that traditional iconography misses. Bal's approach combines semiotics with feminist theory and narratology.

How to Apply Semiotics to a Work of Art

Start by identifying the signs. What objects, colors, gestures, and spatial arrangements are present in the artwork? Each of these is a signifier. Then ask what each signifies. Some significations are conventional and widely shared: a dove signifies peace, a skull signifies death. Others are specific to a particular culture or period: a particular flower in a 17th-century Dutch still life signifies the brevity of life in a way that the same flower in a 21st-century photograph does not.

Next, distinguish between denotation and connotation. What does the image literally show? What does it suggest or imply? Jan van Eyck's The Arnolfini Portrait (1434, National Gallery, London) denotes a man and a woman in a room. It connotes marriage, fidelity, wealth, and divine witness through signs that include the joined hands, the single candle in the chandelier, the mirror, and the dog. Each of these objects functions as a sign within the cultural code of 15th-century Flanders.

Finally, look for the myth, in Barthes's sense. What cultural assumption does the image naturalize? The Arnolfini Portrait naturalizes the idea that marriage is a sacred, witnessed, economically structured institution. This is not a universal truth about marriage. It is a specific cultural construction, and the painting makes it appear natural by encoding it in a visual system that its original viewers would have read as self-evident.

For a painting that uses signs more overtly, consider Pablo Picasso's Guernica (1937, Museo Reina Sofia). The bull, the horse, the broken sword, the light bulb, the screaming woman holding a dead child: each is a sign. The bull denotes an animal but connotes brutality, Spain, or Franco's regime, depending on the interpretive code. The light bulb denotes illumination but connotes the bombing raid, technological destruction, or the eye of God. Guernica is a semiotic system in which signs operate at multiple levels simultaneously, and its power comes from the density and ambiguity of its signification. You can read more about the movement Picasso worked within in our entry on Cubism.

Related Terms and Concepts

Semiotics is part of a broader set of approaches to meaning in art. Reception theory complements semiotics by focusing on how viewers interpret the signs that artworks present. Formalism is the approach that semiotics challenges, because formalism focuses on visual form while semiotics focuses on meaning and signification. Neuroaesthetics studies the brain mechanisms underlying sign processing, providing a biological perspective on what semiotics describes culturally. Symbolism is both an art movement and a general concept that semiotics analyzes. Composition shapes how signs are arranged and in what order the viewer reads them. For more on how to analyze what you see, read our post on how to read a painting, or explore our guide to color theory fundamentals.

Practice Reading Signs

Pick any painting in a museum and try to catalog its signs. Start with the obvious ones: what objects are depicted? What do they signify in the culture that produced the painting? Then move to the less obvious: what do the colors signify? What about the spatial arrangement? Who is placed higher, lower, larger, smaller? What does the lighting signify? Each of these is a sign, and the painting's meaning is the product of their interaction. You will find that semiotic analysis reveals meanings that a purely formal analysis would miss, and that the same painting yields different meanings when read through different cultural codes.

For more on how meaning is constructed in art, read our entries on reception theory, formalism, and neuroaesthetics, or explore our post on how to read a painting to practice applying semiotic analysis to specific works.