Brill Launches Chinese Iconography Thesaurus in Open Access

International publisher Brill is proud to announce the launch of a new database in Open Access: The Chinese Iconography Thesaurus.

The Chinese Iconography Thesaurus (CIT) is freely accessible and brings together Sinology, Art History and Information Studies, creating the first alternative classification scheme, especially designed for Chinese visual culture, with a complementary image archive. Traditionally, Iconography has been used to index and access images of European art. Because of the lack of alternative models, the contents of non-Western art objects have long been catalogued according to Eurocentric classifications. To fill this gap, a research group led by Hongxing Zhang, Senior Curator of Chinese collections at the V&A London, created the CIT.

The CIT website is built and hosted by Brill. The database can be consulted in both Chinese and English and is regularly updated. Currently, it contains 10,000 terms extracted primarily from pre-1900 sources and 2700 images of objects from the V&A, the MET, and the National Palace Museum in Taipei.

The database is an important resource for all interested in iconography, especially anyone concerned with motifs, subjects and themes of the Chinese art produced in the periods from the Five Dynasties to the Qing Dynasty.

For more information on the CIT visit the Brill website or contact Ms. Liesbeth Hugenholtz, Acquisitions Editor Art History at Brill, via Hugenholtz@brill.com.

About Brill
Founded in 1683 in Leiden, the Netherlands, Brill is a leading international academic publisher in  Middle East and Islamic Studies, Asian Studies, Classical Studies, History, Biblical and Religious Studies, Languages & Linguistics, Literature & Cultural Studies, Philosophy, Biology, Education, Social Sciences and International Law. With offices in Leiden (NL), Boston (US), Paderborn (GER), Singapore (SG) and Beijing (CN), Brill today publishes over 300 journals and close to 1,400 new books and reference works each year, available in print and online. Brill also markets a large number of primary source research collections and databases. The company's key customers are academic and research institutions, libraries, and scholars. Brill is a publicly traded company and is listed on Euronext Amsterdam NV. For further information, please visit Brill.com.