Lorenzo Viani : visual at work : Critical, semiotic and iconographic studies ; Lorenzo Viani : le visuel à l'œuvre : Études critiques, sémiotiques et iconographiques ; Lorenzo Viani : il visuale all'opera : Studi critici, semiotici e iconografici

Abstract

Broadly speaking, this work is framed within Cultural Studies. This current of thought, born in Great Britain in the 1960s from the works of R. Hoggart, S. Hall, and R. Williams, invites us to question the notion of culture in all its dimensions, evidencing political, ideological, and power issues. According to Cultural Studies, the concept of text designates not only that of written language, but all cultural production, including image.In keeping with this perspective, the object of study, that is Lorenzo Viani's work, is undertaken through a transdisciplinary approach. The texts, or in this case images, are worked on aided by a crossover of contributions by different disciplines, such as Sociology, Philosophy, Aesthetics, Art History, Literature Theories, Mediology, and Semiotics.Because of this, the main corpus, as in all of Viani's published works, once achieved the first stage of literal comprehension of the texts which required a philological approach, was analysed in an open manner, considering of society, history, and relationships with cultural phenomenons from which they originate. In first place, the thesis deals with an in-depth study of Viani's biography. We have reconstructed in detail his intellectual education and the network of relationships which Viani, who was a very active character in the political and cultural scene of Versilia in his time, built and nurtured throughout his life.Taking into account the fact that Viani, one of many talents, began his artistic endeavors as painter and illustrator, and that he devoted himself to writing (journalistic and literary) in a subsequent phase, we have given weight to the dimension of image in our analyses of his texts. We use the concept of "spoken image", going by W.J.T. Mitchell's definition. That is to understand where these images come from, why Viani chose them, and if they have an aesthetic function or one of another nature. The objective is a comparative analysis between word/spoken image. We aim to examine if the general idea that Viani has ...