ART REVIEW : ‘From Callot to Piranesi’ Exhibit Captures Age-Old Vanities

“From Callot to Piranesi: Old Master Prints 1600-1800 from the Collection” is the dull title given to a lively and thought-provoking show at the County Museum of Art. The survey of 160 works (many of them previously unexhibited), highlight LACMA’s collection of baroque and rococo prints--but Rembrandt emerges as inarguably the star of the show.

Running through May 27, the show inadvertently reveals the human race to be evolving at a remarkably slow pace; as can be seen in these small, mostly black-and-white images, little has changed over the last four centuries.

Then as now, man viewed nature as a mirror of the human soul in its most exalted state. Then as now, man was a vain and egotistical creature: in the baroque era, people commissioned ennobling portraits of themselves; today, with the aid of therapy and aerobics, man views himself as a work in progress with perfection an attainable goal.

Expertly curated by Bruce Davis, “Callot to Piranesi” is divided into three sections, the first of which, “Naturalism: Landscape and Genre,” kicks off with a series of images by French artist Jacques Callot, a transitional figure who bridged the 16th and 17th centuries. Included here is Callot’s “The Beggars,” a set of 25 picturesque images of 16th-Century bag people, and “The Hunchback,” a set of 21 renderings of sad souls afflicted with that deformity. At a glance, these images seem rather heartless and predatory, but as any student of Michel Foucault can tell you, society’s relationship with the sick, deformed and insane has changed drastically over the last four centuries. These people occupied a societal role of considerable more dignity in Callot’s day.

Rembrandt’s work dominates all three sections. A master of chiaroscuro and spatial effects and an artist of tremendous range, he’s represented by 20 works, the first of which, “Beggar Seated on a Bank,” is an exquisitely detailed portrait of a content-looking bum watching a river flow. The piece dates from 1630, but the subject is a dead ringer for Bob Dylan; he’s got the same grizzled beard and the same expression (a mixture of suspicion, irritation and mischievousness).

Frenchman Philbert-Louis Debucourt represents genre art at a rather insipid extreme. His “The Two Kisses,” for example, depicts a frilly parlor where a damsel chaperoned by a yappy-looking lap dog accepts a chaste kiss on the hand by a suitor. In a similar mood, Debucourt’s “The Pleasures of Fatherhood” finds three adults watching adoringly as a well-dressed man dandles his infant on his knee. A museum patron studying Debucourt’s work on was overheard to coo, “Oh, this is darling!”--an apt critique of his work.

Also included in this section are landscapes by Canaletto (currently the subject of a major revisionist study at the Metropolitan Museum in New York), English artist Thomas Gainsborough, whose rendering of a ruined churchyard reflects the British taste for evocative, picturesque views, Claude Lorrain and Rembrandt. In virtually all of these images, man is shown as dwarfed by and subservient to the landscape.

The section of the show titled “The Passions of the Soul: Narrative and Portraiture,” finds artists employing ecstatic religious states, visions, miracles and martyrdoms as subject matter in works that attempt to express dramatic ideas and emotional states through facial expression, gesture and composition. Approaches to this basic recipe vary widely, and stretch from the rational expression of grief seen in Benoit Audran’s “The Sickness of Alexander the Great,” to the roiling, lurid hysteria of Italian artist Bartolomeo Coriolano’s “The Fall of the Giants.” “The Feast of Anthony and Cleopatra,” a work by Fragonard based on a painting by Tiepolo, features a bank of fluffy clouds (a trademark motif for both those artists), while an entire wall is given over to a series of narrative scenes by Rembrandt, most of which are biblical allegories.

Though naturalism was considered of paramount importance in art of the day, portraiture was still subject to a good deal of idealization. This no doubt had something to do with the fact that portraits were usually done by commission, and hence had to be acceptable to their sitters. Baroque portraitists strove to present their subjects “in the grand manner,” as figures worthy of respect. Those ground rules didn’t leave room for much improvisation, and the portraits on view share a certain uniformity.

Rembrandt--perhaps the finest portraitist of his age--is the most notable artist in this section. Also of interest is British artist Valentine Green, whose work has a slick luminosity evocative of Harnett. The work itself isn’t particularly great, but it merits attention because Green is the only female artist in the show; her work gets one to thinking about the position of women during the baroque period.

The shows winds up to a wonderfully wacky crescendo with the “Allegory and Caprice” section, which is where all the weird stuff has been grouped together. Georges-Francois Blondel’s “A View of the Temple of Bacchus at Rome,” a magical scene of a religious ritual shrouded in smoke and fog, is evocative of Andre Tarkovsky’s masterful cinematic evocation of the Dark Ages, “Andre Roublev.” Stefano della Bella’s “Colossal Statue of the Apennines” depicts a massive figure dripping with icicles of foliage who appears to be emerging from a giant mountainside, while Rembrandt offers “Faust in his Study Watching a Magic Disk.” Tiepolo contributes an equally strange work titled “A Magician Pointing Out a Burning Head to Two Youths.”

Much of the work in this section is marvelously outlandish; included are insanely detailed architectural renderings that are essentially works of fantasy, elaborate experiments in stage design that pass themselves off as religious allegories, and maudlin memento mori for the glory days of Ancient Greece. “Callot to Piranesi” reminds us that man has always been capable of silliness of the highest order--perhaps his most endearing trait.