"Invention" and "production of signs" in the drawing from the viewpoint of Umberto Eco and its relation to modern hermeneutics

Umberto Eco (1932 - 2016) founded and developed one of the most important approaches in contemporary semiotics, usually referred to as interpretative semiotics. The main books in which he elaborates his theory are La struttura assente (1988), A Theory of Semiotics (1976), The Role of the Reader (1979), Semiotics and Philosophy of Language (1984), The Limits of Interpretation (1990), Kant and the platypus (1997), and From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation (2014). Eco’s Semioticsis a critique of the theory that the meaning of signs is determined by the objects (i.e. things or events) to which they refer, and is a rejection of the notion that ‘iconic’ signs must be likenesses of their objects. Eco argues that the meaning of signals or signs is not necessarily determined by whether they refer to actual objects, and he explains that the existence of objects to which signals or signs may correspond is not a necessary condition for their signification. Eco also criticizes the notion that a typology of signs may clarify the nature of sign function, arguing instead that any typology of signs may fail to explain how different kinds of signs may share the same modes of production. Eco thus argues that the correct approach to developing a unified semiotic theory should not be to propose a typology of signs but should be to provide a method of investigating how sign-vehicles may function as signs and to provide a means of understanding how sign-vehicles may be produced and interpreted. Eco’s theory of modes of sign production provide many insights into the ways in which the meaning of signs may be culturally defined. He rejects what he calls ‘naïve iconic’ as a theory which falsely assumes that so-called 'iconic' signs must be similar or analogues to their objects, and he argues instead that the iconicity of any particular mode of sign-production is a matter of cultural convention. He explains, however, that to say that the iconicity of any particular mode of sign-production is a matter of cultural convention is not to say that it is a matter which is decided upon arbitrarily. To the contrary, the degree of iconicity of any particular expression may be determined by the degree to which the expression is correlated with its content, and may not be determined by the degree to which the expression is similar or analogous to some object to which it may refer. Iconicity may therefore be a property of a particular mode of producing ‘sign-functions,’ but may not be a property of any particular kind of sign. In his semiotics, Eco has studied the "invention" and the production of signs in Painting. He refers to the works of artists such as Raffaello Sanzio and Francesca in the classical style as well as artists such as Pitet Mondrian and Kandinsky in modern art, to "modest invention" and " inventions radicles". The important note here is the same process production of signs and their interpretive capability that is central point in the modern Hermeneutics.