THE CONCEPT OF “ARTISTIC TEXT” AND ITS IMPORTANCE FOR THE DOCUMENTATION SCIENCES

This article develops the theoretical itinerary that, having the communicative nature of the artistic images as the starting point, permits to formulate, with epistemological inputs coming from different semiotic and semiological approaches, the concepts of “artistic text” and “pictorial text”. Such concepts have great importance for the Documentation Sciences, because they permit to consider each artistic image as an aesthetic object bearer of a speech susceptible of being analyzed; to situate each one of them in the context that makes them legible, responding to their origin, use and typology; to investigate the correlations that have place between their aesthetic architecture and the communicative function that they perform; and, finally, to elaborate a model of analysis oriented towards the production of documental representations, which permit to communicate and recover the analyses made within the information systems in which such artistic images are developed. - in detriment of the iconic communication forms – expressive,


INTRODUCTION
The objective of this work 1 is to identify and systematize the theoretical fundaments about which the consideration of any pictorial work as a message of communicative nature is supporteda visual textwhose speech can be analyzed from approaches that consider both its informative value and its documental condition. It requires drawing the theoretical itinerary through which that concept has conformed due to the inputs made from different semiotic and semiological approaches.
This notion implies that the aesthetic objects are considered significant spaces bearer of a speech that can be submitted to analytical processes that divide and give sequence to their representation and reference levels. That speech, in summary, is susceptible of being examined, represented and recovered in documental environments.
Afterwards, this conceptual delimitation work permits to conjugate in a same epistemological model of documental analysissaving the idiosyncratic particularities of each artistic mode and morphologythe diverse codes that configure the architecture of each pictorial text, independently of its nature, and consider simultaneously the particularities that each artistic genre creates and updates in different cultures and historical periods.

THE ARTISTIC IMAGE, A COMMUNICATIVE DEVICE OF DOCUMENTAL INTEREST
The artistic image is, besides an aesthetic and expressive phenomenon, a device of communicative nature, whose informative speech is susceptible of being particularly analyzed, distinguishing its production, emission and reception contexts; the communicative functions that it develops; the various signification layers that support it; as well as the codes it uses for its representation.
Considering the artistic image from this approach permits, among other possible disciplinary approaches, that the Documentation Scienceshaving as the starting point the techniques successfully applied, during decades, to the studies of literary documents and to their logical-linguistic speechesare able to analyze also the principles of the pictorial images.
That permits that the documentalistsconveniently adapting his or her work methodologiesare able to apprehend its signification and to optimize its secondary communication, even the potential users interested in its recuperation.
However, the communicative statute of the rich and diverse artistic manifestations had not been recognized until the Twentieth Century, when, through many disciplinessuch as Semiotics, Sociology, History, etc.and aesthetic manifestations considered secondarythe photograph and the publicity, notablythey achieved that it was conceded to them.
The reasons that explain such event are about the postponement all the iconic representations suffered from in its consideration as transmitter means of cultured information, after the westerner humanistic culture had chosen the literary support and the textual structure like the means for antonomasia, for the transmission and diffusion of the scientific knowledge (SIMONE, 2001;O'DONNELL, 2000).
Although the object of this work is not to analyze the complex economical, social, technological and cultural processes that concurred in this election, it is not possible to obviate that such designation supposed a notable delay in the consideration of the artistic image as a document, an information resource, or an object of study to other disciplines different from the ones that valued its aesthetic condition.
Presently, the communicative statute ( Figure 1) of the artistic images is recognized and consolidated, though, it is necessary to keep asking ourselves, from interdisciplinary scientific approaches in which specific orders perform such communication; which the participant subjects, the circulation channels, the communicative contexts, the process objectives and motivations, the nature of the message, the codes that participate in its elaboration, etc, are. For the objectives of this work, it is interesting to advance herein some aspects that clarify the specific communicative interests of the artistic image.
In fact, within the artistic images, the pictorial portrays reveal a set of communicative resources that interfere in many semiotic orders: a) In the representation order.
b) In the commemoration and exaltation order.
c) In the persuasion order.
As content analysts, our objective is to understand the complex dynamics of production, use and reception of the pictorial portrays, responding to its origin and typology, and placing them in the context that makes them legible, so that it is possible to investigate the correlations that take place between the aesthetic architecture and the communicative function of those artistic images.
As specifically documental investigators, our observation, moreover, has to generate some documental products that permit to communicate and subsequently recover the result of that exam inside the information systems in which those artistic images are developed.
In the great part of the cultural processes, the pictorial portrays are presented as symbolic elements that serve not only to the self-representationand for it, for the self-definition of the society that produces thembut also for the exaltation and the persuasion of the values of a kind of society and of its culture.
However, given their artistic condition, they are subject to the ambiguity and to the significant polysemy peculiar of all aesthetic speeches.
They do not work as simple and linear illustrations 2 emanated or appropriated by the established authorityor in its case, by the anti-establishment movementbut, they frequently experiment complicated reassignment processes of new significations, and finish generating contradictory messages in their addressees contemporary or futuredepending on their formation, reception capacity, culture they are part of, as well as many other factors such as their age, gender, social class, ideology, etc.
The abstract categories derived from a certain economical system -

THE DECODING OF ARTISTIC IMAGES
The multiplicity of communicative elements that interfere, as well as the richness and diversity of the codes that are used in their articulation, make the study of the artistic images to provide numerous and very interesting pieces of information about the value system, the power mechanisms, the social structures, the economical flows, the habits, the material culture, the conflicts, etc. of the culture in which those artistic images are developed.
This study requires the formulation of a semantic analysis process that decodes and reads the artistic message speech, considering the information transference processes, the communicative intentionality, and the respective contexts of emission and reception of the messages (Figure 2). That content analysis operates in three successive levels: 1. Firstly, it is engaged in studying the respective contexts of emission and reception of the artistic image, its intentionality and its pragmatism. Definitely, it analyzes the emission and reception of its artistic works, including the author, the mediators, and the users, responding specially to the problem of the uses and functions of the pictorial works that will eventually determine the recuperation necessities. 3. Finally, in third place, it analyzes the image as a realization of a semiotic system, a code of signs that, in the most part of the cases, transcends the artistic message itself and that is related to the ideological, political, economical, social, religious, etc.
systems proper from each culture and each historical epoch.
Effectively, the pictorial language combines a semiotic system that acts in long, medium and short term. That system possesses very varied elements, from the ones that are anchored in the collective unconsciousness and the civilization history, to the "ideo-languages" that are product of the authors' very personal creation.
Deciphering and organizing this set of significations is necessary to create documental products that permit, afterwards, to obtain a precise, exhaustive, and controlled recuperation, within the necessities of the potential users of the diverse artistic information systems.

THE ARTISTIC IMAGES WITHIN THE INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Yet, in order to enable the artistic images to develop within the information systems in equality of conditions relating to any other support or documental kind, it is necessary that the Documentation Sciences admit them inside their list of study objects.
It is known that the scientific study of the iconic speeches has been historically disregarded. Therefore, it was necessary that the communicational paradigm that impregnates the western science since mid-Twentieth century noticed that the artistic objects have a primordial communicative intentionality, and that each artistic image is an entity revealing of significations that interchange with the spectator of that work, so that the Documentation Sciences, having support in the semiotic conceptualization of artistic object as a set of nets of significations interlaced under the form of codes, are able to consider that the artistic works are organized as visual texts whose speeches can be submitted to semantic analysis processes, that subsequently will give place to different documental products.
This epistemological contribution coming from Semiotics reaches a large relevance to the Documentation Sciences, because it enables that those consider the artistic works as cultural products whose documental value can be converted to their study object.
It also makes possible that, conveniently adapting the methodologies, techniques, procedures, and tools successfully tested about the textual documents, the Documentation Sciences can successfully occupy in analyzing, representing, and diffusing, under normalized documental regulations, the analyses they make about the artistic images.
Exactly because of all reasons mentioned above, it is so important to precisely delineate which has been the theoretical itinerary through which the Documentation Sciences have discoursed, in order to join the Semiotics and to transfer the concept of "artistic text" from its knowing.
Clarifying in a detailed way and systematizing the formulation process of that concept is a task of great transcendence to our science, and also the commitment of the following quotations of this work.

THE SEMIOTICS AS GENERAL SCIENCE OF ALL SIGNS
The Semioticsconceived as general theory of the signs, science of the significations related to the social and cultural processes (GREIMAS, p. 27), or as well as science of all production modes of the signs (ECO, p. 321-325)includes among its study objects the artistic works understood as systemsof signs or significationof aesthetic nature. That is to say, for the Semiotics, the works of art constitute a language whose signs maintain an arbitrary or conventional relationship, at least between a plastic significationand/or figurativeand a cultural meaning.
However, in the context of Semiotics, investigation chains and different schools 3 , which center their attention in diverse aspects and that, in good size, give place to different conceptions of the artistic sign, live together. It happens, in part, because the Semiotics is born almost simultaneously, from the hand of two different authors, concerning its geographic provenance and its cultural formation.
On the one hand, the North American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (

TOWARDS AN AESTHETIC SEMIOTICS
One of the principal differentials between the semiotic and semiological chains exists in the formulation of the sign concept from different perspectives, aspect that determines important implications to the subsequent development of a Semiotics of artistic deed (PÉREZ CARREÑO, p. 58-72).
While for the Peircean orientation chain the sign is configured about a triadic relation; for the structuralist semiologists this relation is of dyadic nature.
Such difference of approach implies that, according to the manifest of the Italian teacher Omar Calabrese 4 , two big choices difficult the development of a Semiotics of the visual arts.
The first one is related to the iconism problem, and the second one concerns the difficulties of the existence in the ambit of the artistic images of the double articulation proper of all signic systems.
While the last problem worries preferentially the semiology, the theme of iconism constitutes one of the main interest centers of the semiotic approaches.

The Double Articulation and Arbitrariness of the Sign
Saussure determined that the Semiology should be articulated according to the model of system that the Linguistics 5 had proposed. He understood the linguistic sign as an ideal entity composed by two inseparable elementssignification and significancethat maintain a relation of arbitrary character between each other, that is, established in the center of a certain community, for convention.
None of the two elements have independent existence, and because of that, only in the center of the system they reach their value through an opposition system, in which each sign is defined by the place it occupies in relation to the other signs.
Thus, in the semiological conception of sign, Saussure considered that the two typical features were arbitrariness and opposition.
About those two premises, along the Thirties and Forties in the Twentieth century, the Semiology experienced a very notable development in the chains called Russian Formalism and Prague Circle.
Within the last one, it was distinguished the input of the Czech author Jan Mukarovsky (1891Mukarovsky ( -1974, who wrote, in 1936, Art as Semiological Fact, where he defined the work of art as an autonomous and social signas a structurethat serves to the communication among individuals.
Mukarovsky elaborated his aesthetic theory with fundaments about a conception of the artistic work as significant unity in which the physical object is the significance of a sign, whose formal analysis reveals the signification of the work inside a community. In his theory, the social and extra-aesthetic factors acquired vital importance because they were also signification carriers, and, therefore, they were part of the content.
In the Sixties, the application of the Saussarian notion of sign from a new perspective in the ambit of the plastic arts was carried on, especially for the initiative of the feminist criticism and the post-structuralist criticism.
Thanks to the French approach of philosophers like Michel Foucault , and of semiologists like Roland Barthes 6 (1915, it was created an opportunity for the idea that the image is a sign, and as such, it is registered in a signification system. That implies considering that the relationship with its significance is arbitraryor at least conventionaland, secondly, that it only means by opposition to other signs, whatever their nature. 6 Clearly, the input of the French Roland Barthes (1915Barthes ( -1980 has been one of the most determinant ones for the development of Semiology in the Twentieth century. The evolution of his thought is captured in works such as Elements of Semiology (1964); Rethoric of the image (1964); The fashion system (1967); S/Z (1970); The pleasure of the text (1973); Mitologies (1975), and The lucid camera (1980). Throughout his production the transit is observed from some semiological postulates initially of a Saussurian root to his last stage, in which he sets the structuralist model aside, to formulate a Semiotics of the text, understood as the place of the revolution against the language and the shape. One of his most distinguished inputs was the reformulation of the connotation and denotation conceptstaken from the Danish linguist Hjelmslevand his application to the analysis of the cultural manifestations. According to the French semiologist the first content of a sign is its denotation, while the other contents that could associate to its shape are part of its connotation. Along the Seventies, he substituted the concept of sign and language by the concept of text, claiming, thus, the possibility of producing signs beyond codes, forcing the rules and the conventional nature proper from the language.
With their inputs, those theoreticians notably contributed to the understanding of the artistic sign nature, because they achieved to clarify that the traditional denial of the semiotic nature of the artistic image responds to reasons of ideological character, since it intends to show as natural what is, in fact, cultural, and because they consider that all the semiotic structure constitutes a real power structure.  Bryson (1949-) is cathedratic of History and Theory of art at University of Cambridge, and he has taught at prestigious North American, Japanese, Germany, and Danish universities. His works are oriented towards a conception of pictorial art, more as a system of visual signs than of perceptions. His theory is one that confronts the Gombrichian perceptualism, in so far as that one conceives to the spectator as an immutable and out of context presence inside the knowledge transmission process that every art presupposes, though it is also critic with the precisian raisings of the structuralism of Saussurian root.
Having the analysis of nature of the visual representation as the starting point, he understands that the painting constitutes a sign system in continuous contact with other systems, exterior of it, but that are attached to it. Those implicit cultural codes affect not only the painting conception but also the one of a particular gender, the spectator role facing the image, and the own consideration of the presented objects. From a large perspective, the pictorial works understandessentially the trestle onesas signs inside the ones that different signification systems act, so that they proceed to interpret the images relating them to signs of all characters, including the verbal signs.
Bryson (BRYSON, is supported by R. Barthes's theories to deny any possibility of natural denotation of the pictorial image. He understands that, in that one, the "reality effect" consists of a special relation between denotation and connotation, in which the connotation confirms and proves the denotation until the point that this one seems to reach the level of truth.

The Peircian concept of sign and the iconism theme
One of the most interesting approaches of the multifaceted North American philosopher and scientist Charles S. Peirce 9 is the consideration that He also had a great interest for Philosophy and Logic, and in spite of not developing an academical career, he taught those subjects between 1879 and 1784 at the Johns Hopkins University.
The work of Charles S. Peirce is characterized by its extension and deepness. He produced a large amount of writings, of very varied nature and themes, making approaches of singular interest in practically all the areas he approached. He published numerous articles, recensions, dictionary anything can be a sign, for what it is only necessary to use it like one, and that it is susceptible of interpreting.
His conception of the sign is previous and much richer than the Saussurian, since it is formulated as a triadic relation in which a representamenobject that is in the place of something else, that is to say, a signinterferes as elements; its objectthe object or represented realityand an interpretativea relationship that the interpreter updates between the first and the second element.
The nature of the relationship between the representamen and its object is called signic function, and according to it, the signs are presented in three kinds: symbols, indexes and icons.
A symbol is a sign whose interpretative is arbitrary. It supposes that the relationship between the sign and its object is a law whose lack of knowledge makes the interpretation of the symbol not possible.
The index is a kind of sign in which the relationship between this one and its object is causal. The interpretative can infer the knowledge of the sign and the object and, on the other hand, the interpretation rule consists of the recognition of such causal relationship.
terms, etc. for economical reasons, and also some works of scientific character, as Photometric Researches (1878) and Studies in Logic (1883).
Since 1887, he dedicated himself to write busily about Logic and Philosophy, correcting himself occasionally. In that period, he editted the most part of the 80.000 pages of manuscripts that he left unpublished until his death, and that his wife sold to Harvard University.
Among the most distinguished approaches of his thought is possible the sign triadic conception, previous and much richer than the Saussurian semiological proposal; the development of a theory of creativity linked to his own experience and to the human action, and the abduction concept, central not only for his science philosophy but also for all his work.
The Peircean philosophy has a deep metaphysical tradition. In it one can find theories like the objective idealism or its cosmology of evolutionist cut. It established a new list of categoriesfirstness, secondness, thirdnessthat support his thought, and specially his philosophical Semiotics, because the sign, and according to him the whole is a sign, could not be understood without the characteristical mediation of thirdness.
On the other hand, his Pragmatism that later was denominated Pragmaticismconceived initially as a logical method to clarify the signification of the conceptswas converted to the dominating philosophical movement in America of the late Nineteenths and early Twentieth centuries.
The thought of Peircese was frequently labeled as oscure, because of the difficult access to his writings and to the marked evolutive character of his thought. However, in the last years, the systematicity of his work has been put in evidence, since it has been editted attending to cronological criteria.
In the case of the icon, the relationship between the sign and its object is of similarity, analogy or likeness.
The literary texts and the works of art are very powerful signs, because they behave like macro-signs, in which the interpretative, on the other hand, can be converted to a new sign ad infinitum. In them, the so called problem of iconism reaches recognition. This one is originated from the vague word "similarity", to refer to the signic function in which the icon represents to its object in virtue of its own characters.
The catenation of the signs is called unlimited semiosis and implies that the interpretation, in theory, never finalizes, since no signrepresentamendirectly represents its object, nor it is in the place of another thing without more ado, but that is in its place through an interpretation ruleof an interpretativeand that interpretative, on the other hand, must necessarily be another sign.
In this context, Peirce understands the painting with an eminently iconic nature, while he considers how every material image is very conventional in its manner of representation.
For the North American philosopher, the artistic image is a macrosign integrated by signs, of a diverse nature: Among the principal symbols that operate in the artistic signification system one can find the comprehension of the spatial deepness inside a flat surface; the recognition of some changes of color, having the ability to understand them as shadows or as volume expressions; the fact that obviates the discretionary nature of the brushstrokes on the handkerchief, easily discriminated seen from the proximity and, however, noticed homogeneously from a certain distance; and the most important of all, referred to the fact of considering the painting not as a handkerchief with spots, but as a sign of another thing.
On the other hand, one of the principal indexes is the perspective.
Although it is not possible to understand the Semiotics of Peirce only as a protocol of sign interpretation, this one results very effective to describe the artistic experience, and very notably the painting, as a semiotic experience, that is, as an elucidation mode.
According to his phenomenology, denominated Phaneroscopy, the aesthetic experience is an experience of the merely sensitive and ineffable. The iconic is considered a variant of the primeritya category of being and a form of knowledgeand as an aesthetic category it identifies with the pure sensation, the quality of feeling, also including the aesthetic feelings.

THE CONDUCTOR APPROACH OF CH. W. MORRIS TO THE DEFINITION OF THE ARTISTIC SIGN AND THE APPEARANCE OF THE AESTHETIC SEMIOTICS
The    realities, but their fundamental characteristic is that they operate in a manner sufficiently similar to the reality they substitute.
The elements that compose the sign are denominated signic vehicle the stimulus that operates as a sign -; designatumrepresented by the signand Morris's works constitute the first explicit intent to formulate a semiotic Aesthetics. They identify the artistic sign with the work of art. They consider, in a strict sense, that this one only acquires recognition through a semiosical process of interpretation, denominated aesthetic perception. Interpreting an aesthetic sign consists of noticing the values that reside in an iconic sign. That is, an aesthetic sign is an icon that designates values. However, it also considers that the signs that appear in the aesthetic perception have no reason to be exclusively iconic, no reason to be limited to only one signification dimension, and no reason to be assigned a primary usesuch as the valuative one.

Another of his interesting contributions is the intent of systematizing
and defining the concept of iconism, understanding it as similarity. From this perspective the iconism is related to a matter of degree, since it is defined by the possession of some properties common to the sign and to its designatum. Thus, if the aesthetic icon denotes values, those are apprehended directly in the sign.
However, a value is not something merely objective, or subjective, but relative to the relationship between the subject and the object. That explains the diversity of judgments facing a work of art, due to the different value that the spectators attribute to it, to the importance that they effectively have while they satisfy the necessities that are not universal, etc.

TOWARDS THE CONCEPT OF AESTHETIC TEXT OF UMBERTO ECO
Besides a great systematizer of the science of signs understood as a scientific theory of the culture, Umberto Eco 11 is one of the real impellers of the 11 The Italian communicologist, semiotician, medievalist, critic and writer Umberto Eco (1932 -) is one of the most relevant intelectuals in the European thought since the second part of the Twentieth century. He started his formation at the University of Turin studying Law, but he ended enchanted by medieval Philosophy and Literature. In 1954 he got his doctorate in Philosophy with a thesis entitled The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, directed by the teacher Luigi Pareyson. Between 1954 and 1959 he worked as an editor of cultural programs for the R. A. I., and he could know the culture from the perspective of the means of communication. Subsequently, he has successively been teacher of Aesthetics, Audiovisual Communication and Semiotics at the universities of Turin, Milan, Florence and Bologna. He has dictated conferences and courses at the most prestigious European and American, he has been literary editor for the company Bompiani; he has directed magazines such as VS-Quaderni de studi semiotici and also has been founder, president and presently secretary of the International Association for Semiotic Studies. In February 2000, he created the University School of Humanistic Studies in Bologna, academic initiative destinated to difunding the universal culture.
His initial works, such as Il problema estetico in Tommaso d' Aquino (1956); Sviluppo dell´estetico medievale (1959) and Le poetische di Joyce: dall "summa" al "Finnegans Wake" (1966), were dedicated to the study of the medieval aesthetics and literary criticism. In this sense, his monography "Open Work" (1962) represents well this mystifying capacity, because he uses methodological instruments coming from the formalism and the structural linguistic, joining them to another precedent from the theory of information and the experimental theory of perception. However, the main approach Eco accomplishes in that work is his intent to define the communicative nature of the work of art, inserting it in a general theory of the signs.
In that work one of his key-theories about art is included, comprehending that the artistic work is constituted as a fundamentally self-reflexive message that explicitly searches the ambiguity as preferential value. In this sense, the model of open work that he propounds is an abstraction, linked to a form to propose the artistic problem, not as a critical category, but as an operative tendency present in different ideological and cultural contexts (CALABRESE 1995, p. 120-121).
That idea will be retaken in posterior works, and, once rethought it projection, of cooperation of the spectator-reader. It also introduces in its theoretical formulation the figure of the 'ideal reader' conceived as that one who is capable of decoding the message in the same terms in which the author 12 produced it.
In Theory of Semiotics (1975) he undertakesamong other questionsthe most characteristic aspect of his aesthetic formulation, that is, the criticism to the notion of icon, that develops in a double direction: In first place, putting in evidence the lack of objective criteria to establish the concept of similarity, and secondly, identifyingunder the common denomination of iconic signsvery different classes of signic phenomena. His objective is to substitute the notion of icon by another one, free of the problems that have traditionally associated to that one, although without denying that certain classes of signs, basically the images, are hardly reduced to the structures of the linguistic signs.
His starting point is to consider that the problems raised by the concept of icon are due to, in great part, a deficient conceptualization of the generic idea of sign. If a sign acquires such condition through a semiotic process, so the descriptive typology of the signs must be abandoned and substituted by a typology of the ways of production of the signs. Eco elaborates that typology considering four parameters (ECO 1988, p. 325-373). The physical work requiredsigns produced by recognition, obtainment, reproduction or invention -; the relationship between kind and specimensigns obtained by ratio facilis or by ratio difficilis -; the continuum for constitutingheteromaterial or homomaterial signsand, finally, observing the manner or the complexity of the articulationfrom the hyper-codified signs to the hypo-codified ones.
For Eco, even in the images there are conventional relationships, and including arbitrary ones, neither all of them are like this, nor the arbitrary ones are clearly discernible from the motivated ones. The reason is that there are not, even inside the same community, minimal signification unities, and, thus, there is not a code that can be analyzed. 12 The analysis of the distinct contexts in which the relationships between the author-artist and the reader-spectator are produced, as well as the nature of such relationships, is a theme that appears recurrently in many Eco's works, very specially in his work The limits of interpretation (1990).
The images are, according to him, cases of hypo-codified texts, produced by invention, and in which the relationship between expression and content is motivated. In this sense, they move away from other signs, such as the linguistic, arbitrarily codified. However, in the interpretation of the figurative images, at least two codes culturally established concur (ECO 1988, p. 311-314): A recognition code, which works in the perception of the world, and the minimal pertinent properties that must possess an object to be recognized, and, therefore, considered as so. In second place, an iconic representation code, which links certain graphic artifices to the pertinent properties of the recognition code, acts. That iconic code is defined (ECO 1988, p. 314) as "the system that causes a correspondence of perceptive and cultural codified or even pertinent unities of a semantic system that depends on a previous codification of the perceptive experience to a system of graphic vehicles".
For every semiotician, the aesthetic text constitutes a field of study of great value, because in it the different ways of production of the signs are expressed, and it constitutes a metasemiotic insight (ECO 1988, p. 374-375) about the future nature of the codes in which it is based.
The aesthetic textcharacterized from the peculiarities of the literary text, but equally applicable to other artistic textsis considered a product of a particular work, that is, as a manipulation of the expression that is provoked and, on the other hand, provokes a readjustment of the content and a process of exchanging the code that induces an exchange in the world vision. In his or her way, the transmitter of the aesthetic text, to the extent he or she aspires to stimulate in the receiver a complex interpretative work, focuses his or her attention towards the possible reactions, so that such text represents a net of communicative acts, instructed to provoke original answers (ECO 1988, p. 374-375).

THE SEMIOTICS OF THE PICTORIAL TEXT
Inside the fertile Italian semiotic school that Umberto Eco has created around himself, the figure of Omar Calabrese 13 is distinguished, one of the main approaches was to substitute the concept of Semiotics of painting by the concept of

Semiotics of the pictorial text.
For Calabrese, the notion of text results especially productive to the semiotic investigation in recent times, because under its definition it is possible to include both tales and novels and advertising messages, photographs, theatrical representations, movies, and also the works of art 14 .
However, the textual analysis has been applied to the artistic ambit since recent times. It lacks, therefore, a complete theory of visual text, what explains that its operative concepts are debtors of its eldest application field, the literary text.
It takes as the starting point a generic notion (CALABRESE 1995, p. 177-179) that considers as text "every communicative entity noticed as self-sufficient and characterized by a functioning that Eco compares to 'a semantic-pragmatic  Barcelona, 1995. Instrumentos Paidós;1, p. 13-14, considers that the study field of the Semiotics is very large: "It is possible to say that the Semiotics has in front of it an extremely wide intervention field: It will undertake the animal language (starting from a limit in the cultural to a superior and complex limit), of the tactile communication, of the systems of taste, of the paralinguistics, of the medical Semiotics, of kinesics and proxemics (gestures, postures, distances), of the formalized languages (algebra, logic; chemistry, for example), of the writing systems, of the musical systems, of the natural languages, of the visual communications, of the narrative and textual grammar, of the logic of the presuppositions, of the culture typology, of the aesthetics, of the mass communications, of the ideological systems. Of all, if wanted. But always from the point of view of the communication and the signification." machine that needs to be updated in an interpretative process', and whose generation rules coincide to its own interpretation rules".
About the concept of text, a new formulation of the method of semiotic analysis of the works of art, whose main innovations are synthesized in four aspects, is developed: Firstly, the pictorial texts are studied through an analytical movement that progresses from the biggest levels, the configurations, to the smallest ones, the denominated minimal unities, without damaging any level of analysis. That new approach is able to detain the unproductive analysis centered in the minimal unities, as well as the eternal interrogation about the systemic character of art.
Secondly, it permits to recuperate the sense of historicity of the codes because it considers that an artistic text is always a-text-in-history.
The third advantage consists that the notion of text permits to overcome the problem of the referent of the visual signs, which gives up being epistemological and converts to purely strategic, to the extent that the elected perspective is the organization of the textual machine from the optics of the interpretative cooperation.
Finally, the notion of text permits to abandon the unproductive search of the artistic specifics, since Calabrese considers that it is not possible to interpret each text, independently of the material support with which it has been created, as a self-sustained reality, but as an entity that continuously demands other texts, other experiences of the reader and the author.
Under that theory of the text underlies the idea of substituting a Semiotics of the codes, the one of the dictionary, by a Semiotics of the encyclopedia 15 . The reasons are double: The confirmation that the artistic images do not allow themselves to be fragmented in minimal signification unities, and, secondly, the strictness of the notion of code.
For Calabrese a text is a unity of signification that is structured in different levels, each one of them constitutes a stage of analysis, a recurrence of reading, denominated isotopy. Each reading level of a text serves to submit a unity of sense, whose validity serves only to that text.
He applies and develops the theories of his teacher 16 and performs, under those suppositions, the analysis of Holbein's painting, "The Young Man", The Ambassadors, painted in London, in 1533. He establishes that that work is a text constructed in nine levels or isotopies 17 , in each one of them, some knowledge of encyclopedic kind permits to relate elements of that text to others and, thus, to interpret it.
He considers that, in every pictorial text, each visible material elementbrushstroke, stroke, spatula hit, texture, etc.is always significant.
However, it is impossible to typify a canonic repertory of brushstrokes, strokes, textures, colors, etc., that could constitute a set of oppositions, universally valid to all the painting system.

CONCLUSIONS
The semiotic notions of artistic text and pictorial text formulated by U.
Eco and O, Calabrese have shown a great theoretical potency and instrumental capacity sufficient to conceptualize each artistic image as a communicative structure 16 Basically, he makes his the proposal of Umberto Eco in Lector in fábula, where he provided a pragmatic definition of isotopy as an answer to the question about the text content. 17 In the first level, the painting is presented as a secret related to the skull situated in the first end.
The second isotopy is related to the identity of the characters. The third one remits to the cultural universe in which the facts are developedthe scientific and religious Reform. The fourth reading stage refers to the friendship existing among the depicted characters and other four mentioned previously -Nicolás Kratzer, Tomás Moro and Erasmo de Rotterdam, and the painter himself. The fifth level is related to the political hapennings that explain the paintingthe mission of the ambassadors was to avoid the rupture between the anglican and roman churches. The sixth stage is the painting itself: The text is shown as an application of the theory of painting as a mistake. The seventh level resides in the linguistic game about death, from the presence of many skulls and of a word game with the name Holbein in ancient German. The eighth level is of autobiographic nature, since it relates all the previous elements to the artist's biography. The last stage is philosophical, since it relates the elements of the other levels from the perspective of truth and lie, the secret and death. systemically organized and characterized by a functioning, that is updated in an interpretative process, whose generation rules coincide with its own interpretation rules, permitting to approach its structures, in successive levels of complexity, to ordinate and interpret them.
That conceptual input has important implications to the Documentation Sciences, because it supposes, in fact, to consider that each artistic image is a cultural product whose signification is submitted to construction processes. In so far as the codified message, its documental value is susceptible to be analyzed through the study of each one of the codes about which it is articulated.
It also supposes considering that each artistic image is an aesthetic object, and, like one, a significant space with informative and documental value, whose speech, in summary:  Can be located in contexts that explain its origin, function, use and typology.
 Can be submitted to analytical processes that segment and continue its levels of representation and reference. Finally, it also permits to extrapolate, not only the model of analysis, but also the methodology and the procedure to other iconic kinds simpler than the artistic images, but equally relevant to the Documentation Sciences, such as the photojournalistic, advertising, documental, scientific, etc, images.