Enunciation in visual semiotics, especially in religious painting

This article aims to show how the semiotic theory of text interpretation allows us to access the reading of visual religious texts and the knowledge they contain and intend to transmit. The semiology of images studies images as texts or discourses and, in the case of religious images, as texts that refer to another text, that is, religion as a system of communication and elaboration of messages. Consequently, the theories of enunciation elaborated according to linguistic texts should be able to be transposed into visual semiotics. We can find in the images an analog correspondent of linguistic enunciation: visual enunciation. The personal, temporal and spatial modalities of the enunciated enunciation will be analyzed, with examples taken from Western religious painting.