Friedrich Theodor Vischer's essay "The Symbol" considers empathy in aesthetics in relation to meaning. He outlines three modalities of the symbol. The first points to a conflation of the image and its meaning. At the other extreme, the image and its meaning are set apart from one another. Finally, there is the linkage "with reservation" between image and meaning, in which the beholder knows that the image and that to which it refers are distinct. Vischer's discussion of the symbol was influential on twentieth-century art historians, such as Aby Warburg and Edgar Wind. His study of symbols is still relevant to conceptual questions that drive the study of images today.
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Vischer et al. (2015) studied this question.