A Short Definition of Visual Metaphor

by Mark Staff Brandl

Visual Metaphor or Visual Trope

× Mark Staff Brandl, Dr. Great Art

A visual metaphor is an image that suggests a particular association, similarity or analogy between two (or more) generally unconnected visual elements. This often functions in a roughly comparable fashion to the better-known concept of verbal metaphor, but not always, and visual metaphor has developed many of its own unique characteristics. This “presence,” whether 2D, 3D, filmic or whatever, is primarily optical. It is a nonverbal embodiment of a conceptual metaphor. As Noël Carroll describes it, visual metaphor “prompt insights” in the viewer by depicting “noncompossible” (generally impossible to combine) elements in a “homospatially unified” image. Furthermore, the optical tropes are typically intended for the viewer to recognize as having heuristic value, not a representation of an actual previously unknown entity, such as a god, mythical creature, strangely surfaced object or the like.

In cognitive metaphor theory, this would be described as an imagistic target compared pictorially to some visual thing from another category, the source. (In I.A. Richards’s language, the tenor and vehicle, respectively.)

Comparable to verbal metaphor, these visual metaphors can be dissected into various sub tropes including, metaphor, metonymy, simile, synecdoche, litotes, hyperbole, irony, allegory, symbol, metalepsis, and more.

I do not solely focus on pictorial, representational images as most theorists currently tend to do. I seek an understanding of visual trope in the formal, technical and stylistic aspects of visual art—composition, surface, paint-handling, color, placement, editing cuts, context, etc., the nuts-and-bolts of creation. Importantly, as a follower of cognitive metaphor theory, I see visual trope as a thought process, involving the fact that metaphors are embodied. That is, that mental concepts are constructed tropaically from bodily experiences. These foundational perceptions can furthermore lead to what George Lakoff terms “image mappings” and “image schemas,” which can then be used to structure somewhat less physical events. Image schemas generally rely on an abstracted sense of space and vision and can be described with prepositions or simple directionality: out, inside, from, along, up-down, front-back, etc. In the arts, both these image-metaphor activities shade into one another along a vast spectrum of possibilities.

The discovery animating all of this is that trope is the basis of thought, thus language is one instance of it, not the other way round. And contemporary visual art contains other, highly intriguing instances. (Visual metaphors are used in advertising, political cartoons, and elsewhere, but my interest and discussion revolve around their application in fine art, particularly contemporary art.)