L’OMCI - Ontology of Medieval Christianity in Images de l’INHA. Une encyclopédie par l’image

Sébastien Biay, Antoine Courtin, Isabelle Marchesin

«Archeologia e Calcolatori» 2018, Supplemento 10, 29-47; doi: 10.19282/ACS.10.2018.03

Abstract

The French Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) has launched a project for scholars and the broader public that proposes an innovative way of accessing Medieval Christian images. The relationship between pictorial content and religious ideology in Medieval Christian images is much more nuanced, and more expressive, than simple storytelling. Ontology of Medieval Christianity in Images (OMCI) is concerned with this ontological level of analysis. The OMCI team of art historians, graduate students, and technology experts intends to build a web resource that will identify concepts and iconographical themes linked to Medieval Christian knowledge and belief systems. These will be augmented by visual examples from the art of that period. By building nuanced vocabularies, OMCI will allow databases and scholars to better represent how such images depict philosophical and spiritual themes that have been diminished in current approaches.

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