Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie
The most comprehensive source of information on Christian iconography
Adding flexibility, user-friendliness, and multilinguality to Kirschbaum's reference work
Fifty years after its original German publication Brill offers a digital version, preserving the original content and the established format of LCI to guarantee that all references in existing scholarly literature continue to resolve.
At the same time it offers a wealth of new functionalities, including:
- full text searching
- quick lemma navigation
- Google Translate support
- Iconclass search and browse
- links to external databases
- enhanced presentation of LCI’s original illustrations
The original Lexikon was published in two sets of four volumes. The first four volumes offered lemmata dealing with the Allgemeine Ikonographie (general iconography). The second four contained the Ikonographie der Heiligen (iconography of saints).
This basic division is preserved in the digital edition, but all circa 8,000 lemmata are offered in a continuous, browsable list. Full text searches can be combined with the first letter(s) of a lemma for fast navigation. Hyperlinks connect LCI to well over a million images across the web.
A growing corpus of illustrations available in Open Access
The original edition included circa 2,500 black-and-white reproductions, but the text of the Lexicon mentions well over 30,000 works of art. A major, long-term effort is now made to gather digital images of all of them. This growing, networked corpus of Christian iconography is made available for consultation in open access. Zoom in on the images below and jump to the lexicon for information.
Collaborate with the editors
Enrich the lexicon with your own information. Brill wants to expand LCI. We would like to get in touch with individual researchers, but also with keepers of heritage collections looking for ways to reach a wider audience. If you have material which you would like to share on the lexicon's website or indexed with Iconclass, please contact us.
