RENAISSANCE BRONZES--A LOOK UNDER PATINA

Beneath the winged helmet of a lithe Mercury, folded into the drapery of a golden Venus Urania, tucked away, in fact, in all the delectable Renaissance bronzes currently exhibited at the County Museum of Art, are some intriguing contradictions:

These exquisite nude figures, lifelike animals and reliefs of biblical and allegorical themes were made in an age fraught with violent conflict and political tension, but more often than not they present a contemplative spirit, enchanted with the concept of ideal beauty.

Amid the sculptors’ overriding concerns with intellectual idealism and human perfection arises an earthy fascination with satyrs, bestial violence and little boys relieving themselves (in fountains, naturally).

The Renaissance bronzesmiths who fashioned this sculpture were so smitten with reviving the Greek and Roman art-form of lost wax casting and with recapturing a golden age of classical serenity that they reproduced armless Venuses and other fractured figures resurrected from antiquity, subverting their desire for human wholeness in the process.

While emulating classical bronze statuettes, the artists switched from religious themes to secular ones. The devotional objects so admired by Renaissance sculptors became homages to beauty and reason that sometimes doubled as inkwells, door knockers, lamps or perfume burners.

Master bronzes--generally small in scale but large in aspiration--were meant to be passed around, lovingly handled and displayed in the intimacy of humanists’ chambers, but now they stand on pedestals in a public museum where they invite the masses to admire and analyze them.

That’s one way to look at “Renaissance Master Bronzes From the Collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna,” but if it strikes you as too troublesome, forget it for the moment. Just bask in the beauty of an extraordinary assembly. You’ll get to the underlying complexities soon enough.

“In the first place, these small bronze statuettes are masterworks of consummate craftsmanship,” writes Douglas Lewis, the National Gallery of Art’s curator of sculpture, in the exhibition catalogue. Both LACMA Director Earl A. Powell and Scott Schaefer, curator of European paintings and sculpture, have judged the show the most beautiful ever staged at the museum.

Bronze doesn’t always elicit such praise, nor is it necessarily endearing; the material tends to be cold, splattered with pigeon droppings or used in such great quantities that it is overwhelming.

None of these problems plague “Master Renaissance Bronzes.” The small scale of the objects, the colorful variation in their surface finishes, their sophistication of form and delicacy of detail are so harmoniously orchestrated that the sculptures are neither fussy baubles nor sterile monuments. Even their beauty can’t prevent them from telling volumes about the society that conceived and treasured them.

Still, the show is likely to be a sleeper, drawing its audience by accident from those who make the pilgrimage to Picasso’s sketchbooks installed in an adjacent space in the Hammer wing.

The bronze exhibition consists of 75 artworks (15th through 17th centuries) from Italy and Northern Europe, including 10 reliefs among a preponderance of free-standing figures and animals. Averaging around 1 1/2 or 2 feet in height and most frequently portraying mythological themes, the works range from a tiny, life-size warbler to a 3-foot-tall figure of Christ bound to a column.

All were produced by the lost wax method that entails sculpting a model from clay or wax and covering it in succession with plaster, wax and a clay mold. Then the layer of wax between the plaster and the mold is melted and replaced with molten metal. When the metal cools, the plaster and clay are chipped away, leaving a hollow metal form which requires meticulous finishing.

So much for appearances and technical matters. On to content, context and those apparent contradictions.

Lewis concludes that this exhibition “encapsulates a legacy of beauty as pure object, inseparable from an ancient ideal of genius and virtue, which is the content of the image. The content is, to the modern audience, the most ephemeral; for the objects have endured, and have even been endowed by the passage of time with the seductive allure of old patinas.

“But their meanings have proved more fragile; for their humanist patrons they not only emulated directly the choicest sculptural treasures of antiquity, they brought the wisely tolerant and pious attitudes of the classical world directly to bear upon modern experience; they became in this sense lares and penates, as important as household gods.”

It’s difficult to imagine people putting such store in statuettes, no matter how beautifully formed and intricately crafted. The secret is in their meaning.

The greyhound in the exhibition, for example, embodies fidelity, the elephant fortitude. “Two Horses Gamboling” is a study in friendly competition. Mercury is not just a fleet-footed messenger, he is the embodiment of eloquence. Among other figures represented here, Fortuna is destiny, Saturn is age, while a pairing of Venus and Mars merges love and strife.

The most constant theme, however, is the uneasy balance between humankind and nature. This concept appears when a little boy struggles with a goose, when a putto rides a dolphin and in a depiction of Bellerophon taming Pegasus. More often, human beings and animals become one hybrid, as when the centaur Nessus (half horse and half man) abducts Deianira or in a sculpture of Triton (half fish, half man) and in various goat-legged satyrs.

The satyrs, or Pan figures, can be comic or tragic, but they always symbolize failed humanity. The raw spirit of the wild has its own power but it has arrived at a barrier, a state of perpetual imperfection. Instead of achieving balance, the mythical character is caught in a conflict that symbolizes the ambiguity and uncertainty of human existence.

Such mythical beings held enormous interest for Renaissance humanists for they not only presented pertinent philosophical issues, they revived a body of thought from the heart of classicism, affording endless opportunities for individual critical thinkers to ponder the nature of human existence within a framework of classical culture.

These works by the Florentine master Giambologna and his collaborators, and a host of other known and anonymous artists, enjoyed a relatively wide distribution. They found homes in the studies of Renaissance humanists--merchants, statesmen and scholars--as well as in princely collections.

A Renaissance kunstkammer might have included natural curiosities along with man-made artworks. Some bronzes, cast from real birds and small animals, merged natural form with human artists’ efforts.

The Vienna collection came, in part, from Archduke Ferdinand II’s Schloss Ambras, near Innsbruck. His bronzes were supplemented by subsequent members of the Hapsburg family. In 1806, parts of the collection were moved to Vienna to avoid an attack from Napolean’s forces and ensconced in a palace.

The Kunsthistorisches Museum was opened in 1891 by Emperor Franz Josef and the Ambras collection was incorporated into it. Since then, the collection has been enlarged by two important holdings and occasional purchases of bronze statuettes, busts and plaquettes, now totaling more than 1,000.

As an art form, the Renaissance bronze has long since left its “cabinets of curiosities” and private chambers of scholarly inspiration. Now that some outstanding examples have gone on tour--and we have had a chance to explore the forces that created them--their contradictions are not what they appear to be.

The bronzes are articles of faith that straddle several centuries. Though some are outright copies of Greco-Roman models, the more telling ones adapted to the ideals and aspirations of their humanistic era. We tend to see the Renaissance through the same rose-colored glasses used by people of that period to view the Golden Age of Classicism. The bronzes reflect a far more conflicted and interesting era.