What Images Really Tell Us: Visual Rhetoric in Art, Graphic Design, and Advertising

How do images hold and convey meaning? How do we understand them? What are they trying to say? How do they persuade and influence us? The author writes a complete account analyzing the meaning and construction of images, throughout history to present times, from the point of view of visual rhetoric. From advertising to graphic design, cinema and art, the book takes the reader on a journey of metaphors, metonymies, hyperboles and other rhetorical figures, which compose the visual language and the power of its meaning. By learning to identify them, and knowing examples of how they have been used, the reader will learn how to use and master the language of images.

Massimo Mariani, a graduate in painting at the Accademia di Brera, has exhibited in numerous galleries in Italy and abroad. He is a prolific author with many books published in Italian on such diverse topics as Freud and the subconscious, the representation of the feminine, detective stories and poetry.