bildGRID gathers image collections with structured, well-organized subject access. Every picture is described, and every description is encoded with Iconclass, so that what one scholar has seen can be built on by the next.
crucified Christ with Mary and John on either side of the cross
Three catalogues, each complete in itself, each indexed with the same shared vocabulary of subjects.
A searchable edition of Erasmus’ Adagiorum chiliades, linked to the Collectanea of 1500, to the Loci Communes under which the adages were read, to Iconclass, and to the emblem books that carried them across Europe.
Open the Adagia →Illuminated manuscripts, mainly from the Koninklijke Bibliotheek and the Museum of the Book, with every miniature, historiated initial and border described and indexed by subject.
Browse the manuscripts →The marks of printers and booksellers in the Northern Netherlands, with their mottoes, Iconclass notations and the years in which each was in use. Based on Van Huisstede & Brandhorst (1999).
See the devices →Not keywords, but descriptions: what the picture shows, in words, tied to the notations that let it be found next to every other image of the same subject.
Fleeing Apollo, Daphne is changed into a laurel tree: her fingers sprout leaves, her feet take root.
A man on a ladder tries to rope an old, crooked tree straight. Rami correcti rectificantur, trabs minime: young twigs bend, old trees do not.
The poet Horace, crowned with laurel, sits in a niche with a book, his head resting on his hand. Inscribed ORACIO.
“The central operation of research work, including its very conclusion, which can be nothing else than a possibly better formulation of problems, is and remains that of description.”
Staale Sinding-Larsen, Iconography and Ritual: A Study of Analytical Perspectives (Oslo, 1984), p. 41
The core of iconographic research is the description of the subject matter of images. Accepting Sinding-Larsen’s premise means there is no viable distinction between “documentation” and “research”: no iconographic research without description, and no description without research.
Descriptions are never complete. Every student of an image may look at it from a new angle and cut another facet on the descriptive diamond. Yet descriptions rarely converge: researchers tend to start from a clean slate, and new iconographic data are seldom mounted onto what is already known.
That was understandable when catalogues, monographs and articles were all in print. In a digitised environment it is not. The aim of bildGRID is to support convergence, by letting image collections and their subject metadata accumulate.
Iconclass is a multilingual classification system for the subjects of Western art. A notation names a subject precisely and the same way everywhere, so descriptions made for an emblem book, a manuscript or a printer’s mark can be found together, and added to.
Visit iconclass.org ↗Each image is described in words by someone who has looked closely: who is there, and what they are doing.
The description is tied to Iconclass notations, such as 25F23(LION) or 94I181, Ulysses passing the Sirens.
Because the codes are shared, new descriptions are mounted onto existing ones instead of starting again.
Everything is Open Access: free to consult, cite and build on.
bildGRID welcomes image collections with careful subject descriptions: a catalogue, an edition, an index made for a book or a dissertation. If its subjects are, or could be, encoded with Iconclass, it belongs here.