ABSTRACT
This chapter develops the thesis that all pictures, including abstract and other non-representational paintings, are signs. It shows that the arguments against a general semiotics of pictures suffer from the lack of an adequate sign model and have been developed without due consideration of the results and tendencies of visual semiotics. The chapter focuses on the theoretical question, but a brief survey of the meaning of the term “sign”, with respect to pictures in European cultural history, will be given for the sake of historical contextualization. In ancient European semiotics, pictures were not yet among the phenomena enumerated as signs. The Greek Stoics and the Epicureans used the concept of sign in a narrower sense, which covered only indices, such as landmarks, military signals, weather signs, symptoms of disease or signs predicting future events. The interpretants of a pictorial sign are the ideas, thoughts, conclusions, impressions, feelings, or actions the picture evokes.
