Ut pictura poesis - as painting, so poetry. This ancient dictum has been intriguing and exciting Western artists and theoreticians since the time of Antiquity. Are words and images friends or enemies? How has culture been generating symbols and what is the fate of symbols as time passes? The present monograph revisits the historiography of these debates, offers various case studies from medieval and early modern art to films and hypertext, from Renaissance stagecraft to occult symbols, while outlining the 20th-century evolution of the scholarly understanding of the mediality of culture. The ideas of great art historians, semioticians, emblem scholars (such as Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, Ernst Gombrich, Umberto Eco, Peter Daly) are confronted with their followers and critics, e.g. WJT Mitchell, Hans Belting, James Elkins. The individual opinions are placed in the context of historicism, structuralism, and poststructuralism (including gender studies and postcolonial awareness), while among the faultlines the connecting links are also revealed.