Fundamental study of the historian and sociologist of art Pierre Francastel "Figure and place. Visual Order in the Quattrocento Era," published in France in 1967, is devoted to the problem of the specific nature and functioning of the figurative sign. Based on the material of Italian painting of the late XIV-XV centuries. the author builds the concept of a pictorial language, independent and essentially different from all other languages, primarily the verbal, sign system, which, nevertheless, like any language, implies special reading rules. This book is accompanied by a very unexpected theoretical lattice, the influence of which on the development of French art science can hardly be overestimated.