The Role of Linguistic and Visual signs in Shaping the Image of War: Zuhair bin Abi Salma’s Ode and Pablo Picasso’s Guernica as Examples

This study seeks to identify the role of both the linguistic sign and the visual sign in shaping the image of the war in Zuhair bin Abi Salma’s Ode and Pablo Picasso’s Guernica. Both works play a role in directing a general human discourse calling for the renunciation of wars and the call for peace despite the different time span between both: the Ode dates back to the pre-Islamic era and the painting was painted in the modern age (1937). Using the descriptive approach from the perspective of the science of signs, this study aims to identify the role of signs, whether linguistic or visual, in forming the image of war, and an attempt to reveal the patterns of the image, and their communicative functions in the two works. Both works have enjoyed great fame and popularity for several factors: the humanitarian cause they reflect, and the fame of the poet and the painter (Zuhair bin Abi Salma is the pioneer of the Craftsmanship school or The Slaves of Poetry, and Pablo Picasso was the pioneer of Expressionism and the founder of Cubism), as well as the similar method of composition, and the impact of the two works on the cultural memory, which is what the study will try to reveal.