Freitag, 29.03.2024 15:05 Uhr

Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie online

Verantwortlicher Autor: Carlo Marino Rome, 09.08.2022, 17:15 Uhr
Nachricht/Bericht: +++ Kunst, Kultur und Musik +++ Bericht 7933x gelesen

Rome [ENA] The most comprehensive source of information on Christian iconography, edited by Hans Brandhorst, art historian (Leiden University) has been published by Brill founded in 1683, a publishing house with a rich history and a strong international focus. Fifty years after its original German publication Brill offers a digital version, preserving the original content and the established format of LCI to guarantee

that all references in existing scholarly literature continue to resolve. This online edition of the LCI combines the valuable content of the unique iconographical reference work with the possibilities of the Digital Humanities: links to other databases and sources, connections to millions of images, and Google Translate support for English, French, and Italian.The Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie - Lexicon of Christian Iconography (LCI) is an eight-volume iconographical reference work on motifs of Christian tradition prepared by Kirschbaum and his successors. Volumes 1-4 cover general iconographic terms, giving the context of individual subjects and themes. Volumes 5-8 cover the iconography of saints.

In addition to the iconography of a motif or saint, the articles list the most important sources, often a short biography and a short list of the most important research literature. Illustrations represent essential types of the respective picture object. Although the first volume of the LCI was published in 1968 and the eighth in 1976 it remains the standard work in German to this day and has been reissued several times unchanged. The new Brill online publication combines the valuable content with the advantages of digitization. The original Lexikon was published in two sets of four volumes. The first four volumes offered lemmata dealing with the Allgemeine Ikonographie (general iconography).

This basic division is preserved in the digital edition, but all circa 8,000 lemmata are offered in a continuous, browsable list. Full text searches can be combined with the first letter(s) of a lemma for fast navigation. Hyperlinks connect LCI to well over a million images across the web. The original edition included circa 2,500 black-and-white reproductions, but the text of the Lexicon mentions well over 30,000 works of art. A major, long-term effort is now made to gather digital images of all of them. This growing, networked corpus of Christian iconography is made available for consultation in open access. Zoom in on the images below and jump to the lexicon for information. A completely revised edition of the LCI’s content and

an English translation would have taken years to produce. More importantly perhaps, a complete overhaul of its content would have disconnected the lexicon from the thousands of references in scholarly literature pointing to the LCI by volume and column number. Hence, we decided to produce the first digital edition of the LCI in a more cautious manner. The first step towards a digital edition had to be to improve the ease-of-use of the lexicon, while preserving the original layout and content of the lemmata and the articles. To facilitate navigation, the pages have been digitized, while the lemmata and the full text of the eight volumes have been made browsable and searchable. Because Google translate has been incorporated in the database,

the German language text can easily be translated in English, French, Italian and Dutch. Each lemma is now provided with an Iconclass notation and directly linked to Brill’s Arkyves database, a treasure trove of images to illustrate the various motifs and themes. Linking to other databases, either in Open Access or subscription based, is a work in progress. The Full text is searchable in German and the Iconclass encoding automatically added more than 100,000 keywords in German, English, French, Italian and Portuguese, a first but important step towards multilingual accessibility.

It is an iconographical reference work on motifs of Christian tradition prepared by Kirschbaum and his successors and this online edition combines the valuable content of the unique iconographical reference work with the possibilities of the Digital Humanities.

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