Abstract
The project Le Livre Illustré à Lyon 1480-1600 (CNRS, Equipex Biblissima) collected over 10,000 illustrations printed in Lyon in the 16th century, indexed them iconographically in the Warburg institute Iconographic Database in London, and found new ways to analyse illustrations with different degrees of similarity using the automatic image recognition software Imagematching, developed by the Visual Geometry Group at the Department of Engineering Science of the University of Oxford. The article discusses the digital research methodologies currently available in order to recognize and study the concept of image similarity. Starting from the case study of the database Lyon16ci, designed and created during the project, the author presents and discusses the research possibilities provided by these types of digital resources.