Foundation Is Playing Santa Again : Gifts: The Ahmanson Foundation, continuing a holiday tradition, has given another present to the County Museum of Art. This time it’s two oil paintings from the Baroque period.

With controversies raging over government funding and art prices falling from the stratosphere, the art world has had an exceptionally turbulent year. But one grand tradition has remained intact: Coming through precisely on schedule, the Ahmanson Foundation has presented the Los Angeles County Museum of Art with an annual holiday gift.

Two gifts, in fact. One is “A Glory of the Virgin Annunciate With Saints Gabriel Archangel, Eusebius, Roch and Sebastian” (circa 1725), a richly structured allegorical painting by Italian artist Sebastiano Ricci. The other gift is “The Baptism of Christ” (1690), a prime example of French artist Antoine Coypel’s religious decorations.

The two Baroque oils on canvas, which go on view today, were purchased from a London gallery which bought them from private collections, according to Philip Conisbee, curator of European paintings and sculpture. As a matter of policy, the museum does not disclose prices of acquisitions.

“A Glory of the Virgin Annunciate” and “The Baptism of Christ” were painted by artists of decidedly different sensibilities, working in separate countries about 35 years apart, but the paintings are a logically paired gift. Both were made in conjunction with commissioned altarpieces and they are organized as arch- or wreath-like compositions, with figures swarming around a central area of light.

Ricci (1659-1734), the better known artist, is a Venetian decorative painter who distilled the grand manner of Veronese and Correggio in High Baroque style. He created “A Glory of the Virgin Annunciate” as a 44x25-inch model for a 17-foot altarpiece at St. Hubert’s Chapel in the Venaria Reale, a royal hunting palace near Turin.

Ricci, who worked in London, Paris and Vienna as well as Venice, painted the model in his Venice studio and sent it to Turin for approval, Conisbee said. The artist also executed the larger altarpiece in Venice and probably kept the model there, though little is known of its provenance.

The extraordinarily complex composition portrays the saints as the largest and most compelling of a host of characters that are intermingled in a sweeping arch. The saints anchor the canvas, while a bevy of cupids surrounding the virgin rise in an arc of clouds above their heads.

Gabriel, a winged messenger of God who hovers in the center of the painting, mediates between the earthbound saints and the heavenly scene. Eusebius is depicted as a man of learning, wearing a bishop’s robe and holding a book. Roch, who protects the faithful from disease, exposes a spot of the black plague on one leg. Sebastian, who also wards off pestilence, is pierced with an arrow and tied to a column. Conceived as a sketch (however intricate) for a more fully realized work, the model is graced with lively brush work and an air of spontaneity. Bright flashes of pigment bring the saintly figures to life, while the delicately colored and loosely brushed angels seem to float in an ethereal space.

In contrast to Ricci’s relatively dark, masterfully sketchy work, Coypel’s “The Baptism of Christ” is all sweetness, light and refinement. Rosy-faced cherubs fan out from a beatific face of God and form a ring around a shimmering dove, which represents the holy ghost. Beneath this glowing centerpiece is a rustic baptismal scene, in which a ragged, muscular St. John scoops up water from the Jordan River in a seashell and pours it over the head of Christ.

Coypel made “The Baptism of Christ” as a replica of an altarpiece commissioned for the Church of St. Riquier in Picardy, Conisbee said. Lacking reproductions, 17th-Century artists occasionally made faithful copies of special projects for themselves. The fact that Coypel replicated the altarpiece and personally made an engraving of it indicates that he was proud of his work, the curator said. Coypel’s personal version of the painting was passed on to his son, artist Charles-Antoine Coypel, and then to La Live de Jully’s collection of French art. The painting later disappeared into private collections and only recently surfaced in London, Conisbee said.

Coypel was a member of a distinguished family of French artists. His father, Noel Coypel was director of the French Academy in Rome, where he brought up his son. Antoine Coypel absorbed the influence of the Italian Baroque, as well as that of Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens, but in sweetly sentimental religious pictures such as “The Baptism of Christ” his work appears typically French.

Coypel (1661-1722) was a prominent figure in his day, winning commissions such as the ceiling decoration for the chapel of Versailles, but examples of his work are rare in America. Recent research on 17th- and 18th-Century French artists, including a recently published monograph on Coypel, has sparked new interest in his work, Conisbee said.

“The Baptism of Christ” is the first late 17th-Century French picture to join the museum’s collection. It will be displayed in the 17th-Century gallery, along with two earlier Ahmanson gifts, Georges de La Tour’s “Magdalen With the Smoking Flame” and Philippe de Champaigne’s “St. Augustine,” museum director Earl A. Powell said.

Ricci’s painting will take a prominent place in the 18th-Century gallery among Venetian works by such artists as Canaletto, Tiepolo, Gaspare Diziani and Giovanni Battista Piassetta. The Ahmanson Foundation has provided acquisition funds to help the museum build its Old Master painting collection for several years. “We still have many holes in our collection, but good things continue to come on the market,” Conisbee said. “The $10- and $20-million pictures are out of our range, and as prices have risen we have had to look harder for good pieces that we can afford.” The search goes on throughout each year, but results are unpredictable. “I have drawn up a list of things we want, but then something wonderful appears that is not on the list,” he said.