CONCEPT
Metaphorical Transfer
The mechanism of
expression—properties transfer from literal domain (human emotion) to metaphorical domain (visual/sonic properties), enabling artworks to possess and exemplify qualities like sadness.
Metaphorical transfer is the process by which properties that belong literally to one domain are applied metaphorically to another, enabling
expression in
Goodman's technical sense. Sadness belongs literally to conscious beings—it is a state of human emotional experience. A painting cannot be literally sad; paintings do not have emotional states. But a painting can be metaphorically sad—it can possess sadness as a transferred property from the emotional domain to the visual domain, and it can exemplify that metaphorically possessed property by highlighting the formal features (grey tonality, downward compositional movement, spatial emptiness) through which the transfer is effected. The transfer depends on conventions that establish which formal properties in the metaphorical domain correspond to which qualities in the literal domain. The conventions are learned through immersion in aesthetic practice—centuries of looking at grey paintings and finding them expressive of somber emotions install the association
between grey and sadness. The transfer is not natural or automatic; it is culturally constructed, historically variable, and requires perceptual education to be perceived. But once perceived,