Herder en herderin in gesprek c. 1654

This is a page from a manuscript album created by Gesina ter Borch in the 17th century. Here, we see a dialogue unfold between text and image. The script sprawls across the top two-thirds of the page in elegant penmanship, while the bottom section presents a delicate watercolor scene of a shepherd and shepherdess in conversation. The composition invites a semiotic reading, where the text acts as a symbolic system that interacts with the pictorial elements. Consider how the characters stand against a landscape that recedes into the distance, structured by a horizon line that divides earth from sky. Tension arises from the interplay between the written and the seen, which is typical of the structuralist interest in systems of meaning. It asks us to consider how the visible and the readable intertwine to shape our understanding and how a single image can contain multiple, layered meanings.