An expansive but walled city

Marina Warner reviews The Macmillan Dictionary of Art, focusing on the western tradition. Seven accompanying reviews look at the other great traditions

Imago mundi, Speculum historiale, even Le livre dutresor, and, stronger still, The Garden of Delights, a book that contains worlds was taken for a prize of great wonder in its early days; its Faustian initiators could all have been given the nickname of Petrus Comestor - Peter the Guzzler - so greedy were they to know everything, to put it down on the page, add it to the common store.

This new compendium, 34 densely printed, illustrated and annotated volumes, similarly encompasses most known peoples of the world, lost and found, as well as the nations recognised by the United Nations; it contains books within books - 126 pages on "Frames" alone, period by period, place by place, surely the most definitive account of their stylistic metamorphoses ever produced; it describes a myriad visible cities, at far greater length than Italo Calvino's heterotopias, their special buildings, their auction houses and art academies. Paris fills over a hundred pages, from Lutetia in the mudbanks of the Seine to the Pyramid of the Louvre, with a passing cuff at Haussman, whose "greatest error" was to clear the medieval huddle on the island and create that "amorphous mineral desert" - the parvis of Notre Dame.

This immense undertaking has nevertheless circumscribed its world - it is after all a dictionary of art only - unlike its predecessors in the middle ages. But this world turns out very populous indeed. The numbers sprout noughts, Italian-style: 6,700 separate hands have contributed to its representation here, with around 17,300 entries for individual artists in every visual medium except film. Some of these swell, monographically, with detailed bibliographies attached (Picasso's alone generates five-and-a-half tiny print columns, with eight entries for "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon"). The immense task provides all the pleasure of arcane micro-information: you find here "crystal roemers with raspberry prumps", pilgrim badges with mirrors to catch the holy object from a distance, the contents of a stonemason's toolkit and the proper use of gouge or gad; you learn that kingfishers' beaks make very fine watercolour brushes, and that Leonardo was gentle and probably vegetarian but that, if you did not already know it, Caravaggio's violent disorderly character was considered "stravagantissimo" by his peers.

This summation of art historical scholarship also tackles macrodilemmas, drawing on the finest thinkers (Martha Nussbaum on aesthetics; Martin Kemp on science and art); it has been compiled with meticulous attention and long thought; careful decisions about the issues show in its organisation and writing throughout; some individual essays and entries sparkle and surprise and refresh; others do not.

Under the heading "Dictionaries and Encyclopedias", it says: "strictly speaking a dictionary is a reference book about words, whereas an encyclopedia explains things and concepts". But this distinction is not held to: the Dictionary rejects glossing as its prime business: some terms, pentimento, sotto-in-su, grisaille are defined, yet it would not supplant a dictionary of architectural terms, for instance, and a certain reserve - a kind of shadow of the nominal - does fall across its discussion of "concepts", though not of "things". "Art" for example, provokes Richard Wollheim to a witty, self-referencing aphasia, as, in a succinct paragraph or two, he decides that nobody knows what art is, whether it is "a universal feature of human society", or "a rare, perhaps even postmedieval Western" cultural product. And he scolds, though amiably: "One of the reasons why the question remains in such an unsettled state is that it has been common practice, over a wide range of discipline on which it impinges, to ignore it."

The Dictionary becomes more expansive when it considers its own field, "Art History", though here, too, it is suggested that the discipline is a luxury, emerging (like art?) only in conditions of developed and commercialised plenty. This discussion concludes with a fine, spirited piece from Gerard Mermoz laying out the current state of polemic within the discipline. The historical separation of connoisseurs in museums (and the trade) from historians and theorists in academe still fuels disagreements, which can turn rancid. The Dictionary includes clear and challenging survey discussions - "Feminism and Art History" by Lisa Tickner, "Women and Art History" by Griselda Pollock, "Anthropology and Art" by Robert Layton - who point out sharply the limits of conventional Vasari-like biographies of Great Artists and principles of appraisal - and definition - inherited from the Renaissance, and warn against taking "naturalistic representing as the pinnacle of achievement, (and) the tendency to keep artistic culture in areas without reference to the social functions of art ..."

But, so far as I could see, the Dictionary could not find a satisfactory way to pass on, let alone embed these concerns and insights; new historicists, Marxists and Freudian-Lacanian interpreters, or even adept readers of cultural signs like John Berger or Peter Wollen, hardly make a murmur over the solid march past of text. Julian Hochberg's illuminated and expert exposition of theories about perception was finished before 1990 (taking the most recent entry in his bibliography) and therefore cannot include the latest, extremely impassioned debates about visual consciousness and cognition; "Psychology and Art" closes its references in 1984. The value of semiotics to understanding visual experience is pretty much dismissed by Hochberg, and, unhelpfully from the student's point of view, not developed fully elsewhere. The account of the theory of the gaze (under "Lacan"), something students also need, partly because they use it all the time without understanding it, is almost secretive; T. J. Clark's controversial, widely celebrated polemic about the character of the "modern life" that Manet was painting only receives a misleadingly trivialising remark in passing.

By contrast, Walter Benjamin inspires a perceptive appreciation from Martin Jay, who lays out cogently the contemporary resonance of his aesthetic. And occasionally, an essay will offer all the pleasures of fresh research and energetic social analysis: Cesare Poppi's splendid article, "Carnival", for example, which offers the idea that as unruly behaviour becomes increasingly policed, so transgressivenes and outrageous excess grow in the display and spectacle (viz Notting Hill Gate).

In the area where connoisseurship's concerns converge with those of cultural materialism, in a kind oddfellows' alliance, the Dictionary excels: like its medieval predecessors, it is filled with wonder at the properties of things. Stuffs of every kind, natural and fabricated, produce copious pages of learning and lore, of history of discovery and craft. It gives us chapters on wax, glass, gold, stone, pewter, wood, pinchbeck, lace, paper, leather (in the volume "Leather - Macho"!). Under "Pigment . . . organic sources", it tells us of "Indian yellow": "It was not till the late 19th century that a systematic inquiry led to the discovery that it was an extract from the urine of cows that had been fed on the leaves of mangoes . . .The practice for obtaining the product is now prohibited by law."

In this fascination with materials and manufactures, the Dictionary pays homage to its other tutelary spirit, besides Vasari: Denis Diderot, who appears twice in portraits, and who receives a warm, lively tribute from Angelica Goodden: "In their blending of verve and seriousness, unashamed subjectivity and attention to plastic fact, and in their sustained effort to discover the principles and laws of artistic creation, Diderot's Salons deserve to be seen as the pioneering work of modern art criticism." Martin Kemp lucidly surveys the influence of inventions, again concentrating on material differences, but, significantly, he sets aside a review of representations of science and scientists, admitting almost ruefully the absorbing potential interest of such a topic.

After materials, forms dominate the taxonomy: again, these volumes contain, for example, diachronic and regional surveys, such as "Monument", "Bust", "Cross", "Equestrian Statue", "Fountain", "Mausoleum", "Obelisk", "Pyramid", "Reliquary", "Sarcophagus", "Statue", "Stele", "Tomb", "Triumphal Arch". This decision to index under things far more intensively than under concepts connects with the Dictionary's focus on architecture: an absorbing entry, "Artist's Houses", includes Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin as well as Rubens's Antwerp mansion. Editorial preference for Annales-style materialist scientism over aesthetic issues of style of iconography, and even philosophical inquiries into meaning, have also guided the choice of illustrations: dossiers of colour reproductions are arranged under headings such as "Textile", "Hardstones", "Perspective", "Landscape Painting" and "Oil Painting", with material details and juxtapositions that deliberately - even impishly - flout art-historical decorum, Elsheimer next to Poussin, Rembrandt next to Monet, Giotto to Patinir, Bierstadt side by side with Nolde. Indeed, "styles" get short shrift: Rococo is summed up in four pages, while the essay on the Baroque trenchantly argues against widening the term to describe a kind of expressiveness connected to belatedness, profusion and gesture, and fixes it firmly in a post-Renaissance niche.

Not every volume has a section of colour plates - some have two, while black-and-white illustrations have been grouped and placed with enterprise: the "Mona Lisa" appears under "Dress", Gilbert and George under "Erotic Art". But it is the visual aspect of the Dictionary that has suffered most from its own baroque belatedness. Since the work began over 20 years ago, CD ROMs have arrived, delivering the complete Louvre in colour and even allowing viewing of sculpture in the round. Cleverly used as they are, the images here look scarce, and often dated and dim.

The volumes' green cloth-bound, gilt-tooled, paper-and-print technology gives a false impression of its scope, too, which is broader, brighter, and even (yes) hipper. "Automata" is a lively history, bringing their fortunes up to date with Yves Tinguely and Alexander Calder, and including the splendid anecdote that around 1640, Rene Descartes made an android he called ma fille Francine "which performed somersaults on a tightrope and which was later thrown into the sea by a frightened ship captain who believed it to be a satanic device." The quest for genius implicit in the traditional artist's biography has been shaken by the ready curiosity shown in 20th century and contemporary art and architecture all over the world; many of the contributors are enthusiasts, and their comments on Joseph Beuys or performance art or holograms or sound and art resonate with informed advocacy, presented con amore and in continuity with the past of art: Leonardo appears here as an early performer, "demonstrating the flexibility of the intestines of a bullock, inflated by a pair of blacksmith's bellows to fill an entire room." Obscure corners are lit by the Dictionary's torch beam: "Donkey's Tail", "Autodestructive Art", "Process Art", "Land Art", "Psychotic Art" and of course Futurism, Dada, Suprematism and so forth. Many living artists are discussed, knowledgeably: thus Howard Hodgkin is praised for catching "the most fugitive, human and vulnerable sensations".

This Dictionary's definition of its own sphere does however seem to me fatally restrictive in one respect, which reverberates with the ancient quarrel between expertise (connoisseurs) and history and exegesis, or even, more parochially, with the difference between the Courtauld and the Warburg; it is not only that social or political interpretations have not, on the whole, been integrated, but that hermeneutics and iconography have been set aside. In spite of 26 million words, Hall's concise Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art will still be a necessary purchase for any student; the entry "Chalice" for example mentions sumptuary laws forbidding the use of base materials - lead, pewter - for the receptacle of the divine blood, but does not even invoke the Grail or the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, or any other typological meanings. A gorgeous colour page is given to the Cosmati Great Pavement of Westminster Abbey, about whose meanings there has been rich speculation - even if this has been numerological, occult, cranky, whatever, surely it needs a reference or two, but so far as I could see, there is no discussion of the figures in the pavement at all. The engraving by Cornelis Antonisz of Saint Aelwaer, the cod patron of malicious tongues, domestic strife and gossip is reproduced in the course of his entry but it remains mute as to her topsy-turvy significance.

Setting the Dictionary certain tasks, I was disappointed as one trail after another petered out: a rich essay on the Grotesque led to Singerie and Arabesque and other kin, but not to any information about Grylli, the monstrous and magical comic hybrids defined by Pliny, illustrated in the margins of medieval manuscripts, and discussed by Jurgis Baltrusaitis in a pioneering work; no attempt is made to summarise theories of humour or resistance through the grotesque. Similarly, "Labyrinth", which could have led to a delicious wander through the volumes's complexities in pursuit of its many symbolic possibilities, took me to a subsection of "Garden", and to a sobersides survey of Knossos, where there is next to nothing on the controversy over Arthur Evans's reconstruction and the "invention" of Minoan mythology, and its consequent influence on popular classicism and archaeology, let alone goddess cults. If this seems far-fetched, it is worth pointing out that the concerns of contemporary artists, so well represented here, have been richly intertwined with such modern visions of the antique - as they have been with the discovery of the primitive elsewhere.

Connections between stuff and process to ideas and meanings have not been made, almost as if the editors were leery of posterity's verdicts on certain theories. The immense overview of "Frames" does not open into philosophical questions about framing; the entry on "Forgery" concentrates on fakes and crime, and avoids the argument about authenticity in the light of Appropriation Art or other challenges to the primacy of the single artist's hand.

This Dictionary has built a great and civilised and unique city of words: mapped in time, rich in materials, teeming with people, founded on deep strata of learning and a mirror of the achievements of an increasingly popular discipline; but it is still a walled city, and much lies outside the walls - the protean languages of the image, above all - camped there, still beckoning for asylum.

Marina Warner's most recent book is From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers.