ABSTRACT
Beginning in the 1990s, the digital conversion of many analog archives, and especially those specializing in art history, has brought about further research in classifying iconographic material. Beyond the focus on Christian material in the early days of iconography as a discipline, there were also other endeavors to classify images by content. The idea of using tree structures to classify image content may have developed from descriptive and classificatory systems used in botany and zoology. Due to practical necessities, the iconographic arrangement of these visual archives established a unique relationship between image and text. The greatest impulse to iconographic classification in the art historical world coincided with the widespread use of photography as the main working media for the art historian. It was only when art historians had access to an amount of photographic images that it became necessary to devise systems of organization, which sometimes followed an iconographic principle.
