Picture Carmelo Calì Pictures are a presentation whose structure is decomposable into a surface, an arrangement of markings, the appearance of something in front of, before or behind the surface, the reference to a scene of the real or a possible world, whose aspects and concrete or abstract states of affairs are displayed by the appearance. Pictures are a kind of markings, namely patterns perceived on a surface, which do not yet convey information about it. Markings depend on surfaces. No marking exists without a surface, while the opposite is true. Nonetheless the occurrence of markings implies that of the surface, the appearance founded upon them is separable from the surface, because it cannot be used to refer to the surface. Therefore, pictures are decoupled from their real material source, a fact that is considerable a feature for the perceptual system selectively tuned to the environment (Ittelson 1996). That holds whether pictorial markings are intentionally produced from scratch for communicative and expressive aims, or are prompted by the properties of the surface, like the rock in the Altamira cave, whose shape resembles the outline of a bison head and might have suggested to draw a dot on it where it appears as the animal’s eye (Nougier 1993). There is a variety of markings according to the technique and the tools chosen to produce them. Markings can be made of pencil or ink traces and hatchings, patches and blots of paints and dyes, sequence of stitches in tapestry, painted blocks of tiled mosaic tesserae, achromatic and chromatic areas obtained through layered translu- cent filters in printing and films for photography and movies, pixels of electron scan paths generated by phosphors rows for video displays. Markings are also obtained through the manipulation of the material of surfaces by cutting, abrading, scratching, pressing, casting, carving, etching, scorching, moulding, embossing, working by a chisel, a mallet, a drill. Surfaces serve as a medium either as a support (canvas, paper, wall) or as that which affords the properties for particular manipulations (metal plates, woodblocks, C. Calì (B ) Dipartimento di Scienze Umanistiche, Università di Palermo, Viale delle Scienze, Palermo, Italy e-mail: carmelo.cali@unipa.it © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 F. Vercellone and S. Tedesco (eds.), Glossary of Morphology, Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51324-5_94 413