Globus Iconographicus: Designing a Tool for Mapping Knowledge of the Arts

This article discusses the development of an unpublished classification of the arts, Beeldleer (Iconology) that its creator Henry van de Waal (1910–1972) described as a tool with the title ‘Globus Iconographicus’ for mapping and organizing knowledge of visual and non-visual arts. Explorations of the archives of art and literature historian Van de Waal reveal the role that cartographical methods and the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) played in the design of a catalogue system of topographical prints and drawings of Leiden University Library and ultimately in the development of his classification systems of the arts, Iconclass and his hardly known Beeldleer. I claim that Beeldleer has potential value as a classification of the (making of) global art beyond the canon of Western art history and for mappings with non-visual art forms. This will be demonstrated by applying Beeldleer to classify the work of the Sámi artist and environmentalist Britta Marakatt-Labba (born 1951). Finally, I will argue that the publication on the Semantic Web of this incomplete and sometimes outdated classification, preferably in ontology design patterns, might still be relevant for knowledge organization of (digital) art history. In particular, for its syntactic qualities, Beeldleer could play a crucial role in contextualizing the (pre-) preliminary results of experiments with computer vision and artificial intelligence.