Modelling Art Interpretation and Meaning. A Data Model for Describing Iconology and Iconography
This work addresses the problem of enabling quantitative art history for researchers in digital art history, but it is incremental as it builds upon existing ontologies.
The paper tackles the lack of a complete data model for describing iconology in art history by proposing new terms to extend existing ontologies, validated through a preliminary study on eleven case studies from literature.
Iconology is a branch of art history that investigates the meaning of artworks in relation to their social and cultural background. Nowadays, several interdisciplinary research fields leverage theoretical frameworks close to iconology to pursue quantitative Art History with data science methods and Semantic Web technologies. However, while Iconographic studies have been recently addressed in ontologies, a complete description of aspects relevant to iconological studies is still missing. In this article, we present a preliminary study on eleven case studies selected from the literature and we envision new terms for extending existing ontologies. We validate new terms according to a common evaluation method and we discuss our results in the light of the opportunities that such an extended ontology would arise in the community of Digital Art History.