Operating since 2008, Europeana is the EU digital platform for cultural heritage gathering over 58,000,00 artworks, artefacts, books, films and music, the contribution from more than 3,000 institutions: museums, galleries, libraries and archives. Cultural heritage has large umbrella that embraces items of cultural history and remembrance, since events and personalities to daily life. The platform constitutes, then, one more for global availability and circulation of images/forms, but with which screen for Europe is, however, the subject face to an unbalanced portrait, moreover almost unavoidable by such European scope face to limited or selected resources in the platform like a digital library. So, the contrast calls the issue of visual semantics as it is concerned in this conference, and to adress with complementary perspetives. At first, some temporal, spatial, or thematic gaps in that portrait of Europe via the wide notion of cultural heritage are due to the framework. In spite of being the largest aggregator (of aggregators of) of contents across EU countries, Europeana’s output certainly reflects specific constraints (eg. due to images provision also for free use) as well as the contents selection from providers. Themselves confined to institutional profiles, plus disparities in terms of coverage and contributors’ engagement by countries. In second place, the own Europeana’s visual curatorship cumulates the mediations to organise series upon some scripts across digital collections, galleries and virtual exhibitions, among other pointers to browse such as by "topics", "people", etc. Saying this, a luxuriant screen may hide voids, in turn with alternative choices to display images from history and stories. For instance, exploring the repository by periods, the temporal span concentrates massively in items dating since the 18th century, nonetheless to reveal and delight with all a sort of aspects and artifacts less known or seen, here given with visual opulence. Towards a specific glance on the interplay of gaps and serendipity, re/cognition and discovery, the paper also adds data on the category of “art” (visual art, artists included) as it appears in several “entries” (collections, galleries, exhibitions, topics, people) and with particular or mixed combinations (eg. art nouveau; art/photography, etc.). And, still, a special look at Faces of Europe, collection currently online that shows 83 artworks from the 14th century to the 1970s. Through the prismatic approach we see suprising hypertrophies vs. absences of references along with revelations of artists, artworks, and by geographies beyond the narrow borders of the main European history of art. So, quoting from the conference presentation about the contributions by digital tools, it seems a Europeana's way to supply more “understanding of the geography of artistic circulations” that also “lead us out of the historiographical myth of centres and peripheries”.

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