Semantic Redundancy Under Representational Distortion: A Proposed Relational Scoring Framework for Historical Images

Relational comparison of historical images has a distinguished humanistic tradition. Warburg's comparative Mnemosyne Atlas motivates relation-focused comparison across changes in surface form. Panofsky's iconological method distinguishes surface recognition, iconographic pattern identification, and semantic interpretation. ICONCLASS supplies a controlled vocabulary for iconographic classification. Informed by but not equivalent to those traditions, this paper proposes a graph-based scoring vocabulary with explicit decision criteria, calibration duties, and discovery/confirmation separation. Historical images often encode the same concept through substantially different visual forms. Changes in artistic convention, scale, orientation, abstraction, copying practice, medium, and local iconography can destroy surface resemblance while preserving semantic relations. Conversely, visually similar images may share only generic morphology and have no meaningful semantic relationship.