A Life’s Work, Apollo to Zeus : A massive encyclopedic study of ancient art based on mythology is nearing completion.

What is green, occupies four feet of shelf space and makes scholars of Greek and Roman antiquity very happy?

The Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologicae Classicae, an encyclopedic study of artistic images based on classical mythology.

With its eighth and final double volume now being edited and slated for release in 1997, the massive publishing project is being hailed as a scholarly breakthrough. The Lexicon is not only the first encyclopedia of its kind to include more than a few illustrations, it’s also the largest single assembly of pictures of Greek and Roman art anywhere.

“It’s an incredible achievement,” said Marion True, the J. Paul Getty Museum’s curator of antiquities, who presides over a collection of objects that often depict mythological themes.

Between the Lexicon’s covers is an astonishing proliferation of mythical characters--from Aphrodite and Apollo to Venus and Zeus--in thousands of photographs of sculptures, vases, friezes, coins and medals. About 600 to 700 pictures of classical artworks appear in one of two books that compose each double volume. Accompanying each group of images is a separate book of descriptive text in four languages--English, French, German and Italian.

“One looks at all those green volumes with a great sense of satisfaction,” said Sir John Boardman, a British scholar who has been involved with the project since its inception in the early 1970s. “It’s enormously useful and a labor of love on the part of a great many people.”

Contributors come from 40 countries, most of which were represented at the last biennial Lexicon conference, held earlier this summer at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu. Resembling a cultural United Nations, the meeting drew scholars from Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Algeria, Cypress, Tunisia, Turkey, Greece, Georgia, Ukraine, Russia, Albania, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania and the Czech Republic, as well as the United States, Western Europe and Britain.

“It shows that when you are dealing with art and culture in a nonpolitical environment, it’s possible to bring people around a table and have a real collaboration,” said Harold Williams, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, which has provided crucial financial assistance for the project.

But everyone involved with the Lexicon, including Williams, gives the lion’s share of credit to Lilly Kahil, secretary general and guiding light of the Foundation for the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologicae Classicae.

Kahil, a classical archeologist, is an appropriately cosmopolitan figure to spearhead an international project. “People always ask why the Lexicon’s name is in Latin. I tell them it’s because everyone can understand it,” she said. She is the daughter of an Egyptian father and an Austrian mother and teaches at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and works in Paris. Her colleagues say that Kahil has won widespread participation in the project and has raised all the funds for it through a combination of hard work, tenacity and persuasive diplomacy.

“The Lexicon is a tribute to Lilly. It’s been her life,” Williams said. The Getty’s backing “hasn’t hurt,” he said, “but this kind of project takes more than money. It takes someone like that, with that kind of commitment and dedication, to make it go.”

The huge set of green volumes was conceived in 1972 in Paris, during talks among Kahil, Boardman and other scholars about the need for an illustrated anthology of Greek and Roman iconography. The last compilation of mythological subjects had been done at the beginning of the century, and iconography was included more or less by accident, Kahil said, recalling how she rallied support for the project that would turn out to be her masterpiece. “Everything we had was out of date,” she said, and there were few published pictures.

Because the Lexicon’s predecessors were mainly literary, the study of Greek and Roman iconography was reliant on text and oral tradition. “But pictures have a life of their own, and it’s often at variance with literature,” Boardman said. For students and scholars of classical art, “half the battle is learning to read pictures,” he said. “Anyone can read a caption.”

Determined to provide an authoritative pictorial resource for scholars, Kahil established a foundation and an editorial board for the Lexicon, enlisted UNESCO as an adviser and gained the support of several national academies. As materials began to accumulate, she set up a central archive in Basel, Switzerland. Smaller collection points for research materials later cropped up at Heidelberg, Germany; Paris; Athens, and Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.

Artemis, a Zurich, Switzerland-based publishing house, agreed to publish the project and issued the first double volume in 1981--a decade after the project began. The pair of books offered hope that the Lexicon might actually be completed, Kahil said, but the timeline wasn’t encouraging. Although subsequent volumes might be expected to take less than 10 years, the project obviously required an infusion of cash to proceed more quickly. For one thing, paid assistants were needed to conduct research and gather photographs.

Racking her brain for funding sources, Kahil recalled meeting J. Paul Getty a couple of decades earlier during his visits to the Louvre. She knew that the oil magnate had left a fortune to a California trust that assists important projects, so she wrote to Williams requesting help. “A long time passed, and I forgot all about the letter,” she said, “but then one day I got a telephone call from Harold Williams.” After preliminary talks, he met with the Lexicon’s board and sealed a relationship that has continued since 1983.

“It’s a very ambitious and unique project that pulls together what is known about the iconography of mythology through the ages in all the countries in the Mediterranean basin,” Williams said. “It’s an enormous contribution to scholarship.”

He was impressed by the project’s “unusual leadership in Lilly Kahil, who had the ability to pull it off,” and by the active collaboration that had developed. “But they were doing it on a shoestring,” he said. “We could see that if it did get done, it wouldn’t be during our lifetime.”

Concerned that other financial support would dry up if the Getty stepped in, Williams decided to provide help in the form of matching funds. “We have matched dollar for dollar the funds they raise. That locked in the funding they already had and gave encouragement to raise new money,” he said. As a matter of policy, the Getty does not reveal the amount of its grants.

The Getty support has provided employment for young scholars who have helped gather materials for the Lexicon, while speeding up production.

“It took 10 years to finish the first volume, but the following volumes have been published every two years--right on schedule, like a Swiss watch,” Kahil said.

The project turned out to be much bigger than originally conceived, Boardman said: “As it evolved, we decided that if we were doing it at all, we should do it properly.” The idea was to make the Lexicon “as complete as possible in areas where it was important to be complete,” he said. The anthology includes the earliest-known representations of subjects, along with all types and variations, but avoids duplication when the same image appears on many different objects.

Arcane as the Lexicon may seem, its value is not limited to antiquities specialists, True said. Art historians and graduate students working on Renaissance and Baroque depictions of mythological themes, for example, will find help in the Lexicon.

The recent meeting at the Getty Museum was partly a celebration of the project’s completion, but it was also an occasion to consider its future.

“The biggest issue now is to make the Lexicon accessible,” True said. “It costs $1,500 per double volume, so some of the people who have contributed to it can’t afford to buy it.”

One solution currently under discussion is to make the Lexicon’s pictures and text available on computer. Putting the huge reference book online would also allow for the addition of information and inclusion of archival material that has not been printed.

As a leader in a global movement to propel art history along the information superhighway, the Getty Trust’s Art History Information Program is one agency that could help turn the Lexicon into a digital publication.

No decision has been made about the Getty’s role in the Lexicon’s future in cyberspace, but the issue is under consideration. “I suspect we will have some involvement,” Williams said. “We have some expertise in that area.”