ABSTRACT
Julia Kristeva is a psychoanalyst and feminist theorist of language and literature. Kristeva situates her work at the intersection of linguistics, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory. Kristeva’s semiotic differs from the standard meaning of semiotics as the science of signs. What Kristeva forwards are a “semanalysis,” a combination of semiotics and psychoanalysis that aims at revealing how the laws of the symbolic are resisted. Kristeva’s essay on the Venetian Renaissance painter Giovanni Bellini addresses the figure of the mother in his works, but it also extends beyond the particularities of Bellini’s autobiography and his work to discuss his use of light and color in general. For Kristeva, the symbolic in painting is the iconography and the narrative themes—in short, the accepted artistic canon. Beyond acknowledging Giotto’s work as the harbinger of the Renaissance, Kristeva reads the signifying economy in his work vis-a-vis the social context of late medieval northern Italy.
