Cultural aspects such as history, tradition, beliefs and social customs are often depicted in paintings, both explicitly and implicitly. This paper discusses our experience and difficulties encountered while creating a multimedia Vietnamese Traditional Paintings Gallery for the purpose of dissemination and analysis of information regarding the cultural and artistic aspects of these painting . Issues regarding indexing and retrieval are analysed, which provide the motivations for our own approach which combines keyword and visual features-based methods with iconclass-based method used in arts and humanities. The use of XML-based language to express semantic content and Bayesian inference network to cater for vague queries are also discussed.