RENAISSANCE LOOK-ALIKES IN EXHIBITION

Two works introduce “Renaissance Drawings From the Ambrosiana” at the County Museum of Art. They appear at a glance to be a muscular Madonna by Michelangelo and a serene siren by Leonardo da Vinci. Closer scrutiny reveals that they are, in fact, not the creations of these great Masters.

Slam the security doors. Ring the electronic alarms. There are bogus phonies and authentic fakes in the museum .

No, no. The revealed truth is less sensational but more interesting. The Madonna of the Nautilus Machine is by Sebastiano del Piombo, a 16th-Century Venetian who fell under the powerful spell of Michelangelo’s art in Rome. Another sheet depicting a reclining river god confirms the affinity. A brace of other works attests to the magnetic attraction Buarnarotti exercised over his epoch. Giorgio Vasari made him elegant. Francesco Salviati honed his power to crystalline neurosis. The whole Mannerist generation is said to have been weird because they could not work around the legacy of his genius. Michelangelo’s spirit is pervasive in the exhibition but there is no work by him on view.

The lovely lady that looks like a Leonardo is nonetheless superb for being by the hand of Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, an artist who understandably succumbed to the influence of genius when Da Vinci sojourned in Milan. Boltraffio got the Master’s style down so well that for decades he was considered a Leonardo clone. His oeuvre drove connoisseurs crazy because it seemed indistinguishable from the original. Today Boltraffio finally appears to be sorted out as a softer, less intense, more ingratiating talent. Even at that, an occasional scholarly squabble erupts over even such a famous painting as the Louvre’s “La Belle Ferronniere.”

Like Michelangelo, Da Vinci left his stamp on generations of artists. Here we see his anatomical investigations reflected in a drawing by his acolyte Francesco Melzi. The old man’s profile is not perfect, but it is awfully good considering Melzi was 17 at the time. Bernardo Luini popularized a simpering Leonardesque adaptation, but he could also manage a softly erotic charge in a drawing of a young female nude. In the case of Leonardo we have a few postage-stamp-size sketches on view that are nonetheless compelling for being tiny.

The Ambrosiana show is that kind of exhibition. There are curious holes that get you down and sudden surprises that snap the ensemble back towards first-rate status. The mini-blockbuster of the whole thing is probably a superb Raphael pair of male nudes that is surely a preparatory drawing for the possessed boy and his father in the pivotal, late “Transfiguration” in the Vatican. Some scholars think both the painting and drawing may be by Guilio Romano. We’ll settle for that.

On view at LACMA through March 30, the exhibition represents the first U.S. tour of drawings drawn from Milan’s legendary Bibleoteca Ambrosiana, founded in 1601 by an influential patron and early collector, Cardinal Frederico Borromeo. The building was inspired by the library of Phillip II of Spain at Escorial.

Cardinal Borromeo’s extensive collection was augmented in succeeding centuries until it totaled some 12,000 works. These were rearranged, restored and catalogued in the 1960s. Since then, traveling exhibitions have made the compendium better known in Europe.

The present selection was recently seen at the National Gallery. Its unfamiliar contents offer pings of fresh insight, but at least one that is growing wearisomely familiar.

It is dangerous to peruse catalogues of traveling shows in advance. Illustrated in this one is a sheet of saintly, allegorical and nude figures by every drawing lover’s favorite practitioner of the ornate late Gothic International style, Antonio Pisanello.

Pisanello is an almost impossibly charming artist. His work is elegantly decorative and simultaneously based on careful observation. There is a nearly hesitant innocence about this art that gives its keen observation freshness and bite.

The drawing, however, is not on view. Withdrawn by the Italians along with eight others.

Drat. I hate withdrawn drawings.

Never mind. There is still a guilelessly satirical page recording men in fancy dress and another depicting a chicken and a monkey. Pisanello’s tenderness and accuracy in drawing animals seemed to be general judging by an anonymous rendering of a Fox and a leopard by Giovannino de Grassi. Those guys saw animals differently than we do. Their beasts seem at once more real and more symbolically powerful. In our day animals are either depicted as purely biological entities or creatures with human personalities. Thanks a lot, Uncle Walt.

Come to think of it, the Ambrosiana ensemble speaks volumes about the way Renaissance humankind learned to see. If you compare these works to, say, tribal or folk art, they don’t seem to conceptualize very well. They throw out information about space, movement, anatomy, nature, atmosphere and whatever recorded in gray blobs, colored smears and conventionalized squiggles. The mind really has to work hard to pull it all together into a gestalt. No wonder it is said that some tribal people can’t make sense of pictures in the European tradition.

The visual notation is so complex and the idea of representing deep space on a flat surface is such a weird conceit that it is no wonder 20th-Century artists eventually trashed the whole system. Matisse pronounced it decadent and, in fact, it generally remains so mined out that any artist who uses it today has to struggle against looking moribund or eccentric. (That’s why the occasionally successful figurative artist seems positively heroic.)

The real miracle of Renaissance drawing from our perspective is that its practitioners believed in it so fervently that their work still looks fresh and credible. Well, no wonder. Art was the principle language of an exciting new way of seeing the world. Leonardo, of course provides the quintessential example of art used as an investigative tool to probe everything from mechanics to biology and the cosmos. Naturally not all the Muzzucchellis and Boccaccinos of the remaining 80 drawings possessed intellects of Vincian dimensions, but they, and the rest of European civilization, participated in its world view.

An artist who did almost single-handedly spread the vision of the Renaissance outside of Italy is represented in the exhibition. At least we are pretty sure he is.

The German Albrecht Duerer was Northern Europe’s closest answer to Leonardo. He brought breadth and profundity to a North that was still largely medieval and regarded artists as little more than skilled craftsmen. The Duerers on view here connect directly to some of his famous prints, such as “The Knight, Death and the Devil” and “St. Jerome in his Study”--but just look at them and something seems out of kilter. The study of the knight has an unfamiliar, quixotic air. “St. Jerome” has more sensitivity than Duerer’s usual ferocious concentration. Same difference in images of peasants and an Oriental archer on horseback. One image of a tree in a quarry is most Duereresque, but it accidentally looks like a Magritte.

It cannot be a Magritte.

But it might not be a Duerer either. According to the forthright catalogue entries, scholars have at various times questioned the attributions on several of the dozen Duerers here. The question in the long run does less to damage the drawings than confirm the astonishing level of Renaissance draftsmanship. If Duerer had an assistant who could look as good as the Master with a bad head cold, that is significant.

Today we are happy to find one good artist. We long for the towering giants of the Renaissance. This exhibition reminds us that the real accomplishment of the epoch was the development of a system that transformed every artist in sight, and the world in the bargain. No wonder artists stand in awe of the Renaissance even when they hate it.