Quantifiability in iconography

Abstract

It has rarely been seen as a task for art history to give systematic, consistent and detailed access to the subject matter of large numbers of historical images. This lack of systematic documentation severely handicaps all historical research that involves the interpretation of iconographic detail. It leaves us unable to count the frequency with which subjects have been represented, or with which iconographic particularities occur. This article asks whether the use of the iconographic classification system ICONCLASS will help to create countable iconographic information. Its first part deals with the considerations that have guided the shape of the computer edition that has recently been made available. These may be relevant for the electronic publication of classification systems in general. In the second part a few statement about gestures are analyzed against the background of an existing corpus of systematically described images . This analysis draws attention to the paradox that iconographic detail often plays a key role in art historical discourse, but must do so on the basis of incidental information