from Medieval Academy News

The Index of Christian Art: Continuity, computerization, and collaboration
by Colum P. Hourihane

Founded in 1917 by Charles Rufus Morey, the Index of Christian Art is the largest archive of medieval iconography in existence and has, in the past, been one of the main reasons why scholars have traveled from all over the world to its home at Princeton University. Twenty-six thousand subject headings starting with Alpha and Omega and stretching to Zwentibold of Lorraine (a tenth-century saint) provide iconographic access to several hundred thousand works of art that are analyzed in detail. This text file, including provenance, date, medium, and bibliographic references, is accompanied by a second file of over 200,000 black-and-white images, arranged by medium and then location.

Since its inception, the Index has catalogued works of art without any geographic limitations under seventeen different media including manuscripts, enamel, glass, sculpture, metalwork, painting, textiles, and so forth. Complete hard copies of the Index are available at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C.; the University of California, Los Angeles; the Bibliotheek, Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht; and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City. All copies are updated on an annual basis.

Scholars with a wide variety of disciplines and expertise constantly update the existing records in the archive as well as adding new material. Computers were introduced relatively late in the history of the archive, in 1999, with the plan to transfer the existing hard-copy archive to an electronic environment. Since then, all new work-of-art records have been digitized directly, and the campaign to update and computerize the existing files has been ongoing.

The transfer to a computerized environment also gave the Index the opportunity to extend the information on each work of art. Whereas Morey, in conjunction with his colleague Erwin Panofsky, believed that the user should be given as objective and impartial an iconographic description as possible, it was felt in 1991 that concessions would have to be made to user needs as well as to current art historical trends. For example, fields to record style and school have been added to the electronic version of the Index, and the system of subject terms has been paralleled by Iconclass, the Dutch-developed and most widely used system for subject classification. In 1997 an Internet application of this database, the largest medieval and most specialized electronic resource on the World Wide Web, was launched. Subscribers to this database (http://www.Princeton.Edu/~ica/indexca.html) can now access over 20,000 different work-of-art records, 21,000 bibliographic references, 27,000 indexing terms, as well as numerous other authority files, all at the click of a button.

Whereas in the past the Index has been heavily reliant on published material to add new data to its files, it is now taking a more active role in unearthing previously undocumented material and making this available to the wider scholarly community. Realizing that it could not accomplish this alone, it has entered into a number of collaborative projects, amongst which has been an exciting venture to analyze iconographically and catalogue all the Western manuscripts in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. This truly collaborative venture will, over the space of six years, catalogue over five hundred manuscripts (from the fifth century to the sixteenth century), photograph and digitize the images, and make them available on the Index’s internet site. The Getty Grant Program generously funded this project with seed money of $250,000. The remainder, over one million dollars, was financed by the Homeland Foundation. Once completed, this project will make this unparalleled collection available for the first time in electronic form. Over one hundred manuscripts are already available on the Internet, and new records are being added on a weekly basis.

As users have become more accustomed to using this database, there has been an increasing need to add an image component to the text file. Images from the Morgan Library have certainly begun to satisfy this need, with several thousand already available in full color. Eventually this project will add some 35,000 images to the database. It is unfortunate that some of the 31,000 images already scanned and available at the home site in Princeton cannot, for copyright reasons, be made available to the public subscriber.

Nevertheless, there are well over 8,000 images already available to subscribers. Amongst them are all of the color images of the San Marco mosaics, which were digitized in a cooperative project with Dumbarton Oaks, the owners of the transparencies. These images are unrivalled in terms of coverage and quality, and like a number of other image collections available on the Website, they offer a specialist approach to individual monuments and collections.

Amongst the images currently being digitized by the Index and available to subscribers is the entire collection of black-and-white photographs of sculpture and architecture taken by James Austin, the well-known British photographer.

Similar collaborative projects in which the Index works with other institutes in digitizing and cataloguing individual collections and sharing resources are under way with the Courtauld Institute of Art, the University of London, and the Iconclass Research and Development Group, Utrecht. Nearer to home, and of outstanding value to the medievalist, is the campaign to digitize the unique manuscript collection in Princeton University’s Firestone Library collection. Some of these manuscripts, both text and image, are already available in the Internet database.

Not content with cataloguing new collections and adding additional resources to the archive, the Index has also been broadening its horizons over the recent months. Thanks to an additional grant received during the summer months, the Index was able to catalogue some of the Christian elements in Islamic art. This study, working within the standards of the archive, added considerable resources to both the manual and the electronic files of the archive dealing with such subjects as Jesus as Prophet and Muhammad.

The Index has also just recently published the first hard-copy extract from the files. This study, which details the personifications of virtue and vice in the archive, catalogues over one thousand different works of art in twelve media. An additional extract from the same files, this time focusing on King David, will be the second volume in this series of published resources.

The Index recently became the administrative center for Studies in Iconography. This journal publishes, on an annual basis, some of the most interesting, interdisciplinary iconographical studies of works from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The series of colloquia, started in the early nineties and focusing on iconographic matters, continues.

In recent years conferences celebrating the eightieth anniversary of the foundation of the Index (Image and Belief), Irish art (From Ireland Coming), and Jewish art (Judeo-Christian Themes) have been successfully organized and published and have provided an ongoing forum for new scholarship in the area of iconography. The next conference to be organized by the Index will be devoted to art in the service of the liturgy and will be held 23–24 March 2001.

Thanks to so many new initiatives, especially in the area of computerization, the Index is now reaching a new and exciting group of users. Like so many institutions with long and venerable histories, it had been assumed that it would continue with its stable and quiet existence in the pleasant surrounds of Princeton. Not so, however! The Index has always thrived on scholarship and challenge, as its recent history and exciting changes have shown.

Editor’s note: Colum P. Hourihane, a specialist in early Christian and medieval Irish art, is Director of the Index of Christian Art, Princeton University. He has recently edited two volumes published by the Index, Image and Belief: Studies in Celebration of the Eightieth Anniversary of the Index of Christian Art, and Virtue and Vice: The Personifications in the Index of Christian Art.