COMMENTARY : 91: YEAR IN REVIEW : ‘1492’ and ‘Mexico’ Paint a Global Panorama : Art: The perfection of cultural values in two exhibits is more than refinement of form--it is a clarification of thoughts from the evolving history of humans.

Two landmark exhibitions from this year combined to give a satellite’s-eye view of human history evolving. They concern the time when the voyages of Christopher Columbus set in motion a turmoil of epochal change. They arrive in the troubled twilight of a millennial century when the peoples of the planet are again in anxious motion. They speak to the present.

“Circa 1492” at Washington’s National Gallery and “Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries” (which Sunday completes its national tour at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) together encompass more than 900 objects from Europe, Africa, Islam, Asia and the Americas. Set on a scale, the two catalogues weigh in at about 15 pounds.

One might legitimately anticipate such largess to add up to nothing more that a dazzling but incoherent tangle of scattered impressions. Instead, they paint a global panorama that is like watching human history unfold in a time-lapse fast-forward narrative that makes temporal events blend into a planetary epic.

Conceptually, “Circa 1492” is something of a three-dimensional oxymoron--a thinking person’s extravaganza. It is studded with masterpieces from Michelangelo’s “Madonna of the Stairs” to the great Aztec sculpture “Eagle Warrior.” But the art is presented in such fashion that its effect is less one of aesthetic bedazzlement than of an inducement to sober reflection.

One drifts from gallery to gallery in a state of suspended wonder at how the art of each culture seems to exist in a state of perfection. Could anything be more equilibrated than the Benin female head that rests exactly on the juncture between the realms of the visible and invisible? Could anything more clearly express philosophical unity with nature’s rhythms than “Lofty Mount Lu” by the Ming artist, Shen Zhou?

The perfection we witness is not merely refinement of form but the clarification of thought. These artifacts make us mind readers of civilizations. What we most often see are pictures of cultures whose idea of time was cyclic rather than linear and whose notion of space was eternal and internal rather than ephemeral and external. To look at an Indian bronze Parvati is to know she is not of this world.

Neither, for that matter, is Hieronymus Bosch’s painting “The Temptation of St. Anthony”--at least not quite. Its depiction of the beasties of venality and sin tormenting a good man is a haunting fantasy straight out of the medieval European mind. The structure of the painting, however, represents its nightmare in three-dimensional space. Painted about 10 years after Columbus set sail to find a route to India by sailing west, Bosch’s image might be read as a warning of the chaos that would be unleashed by the application of rational Western thought.

Clearly, almost no one in the Renaissance world agreed. There is a palpable sense of excitement in the European galleries as we see medieval piety join exploratory dynamism in paintings of ideal cities in mathematical perspective, in maps, globes, astrolabes and armor. Significant amounts of the knowledge that allowed this to come about originated in Islam.

The Renaissance was a great leap forward in the expansion of human consciousness, but it also marked the loosening of a system of religious beliefs that had seemed to provide answers to all human questions about the past, present and future. The excitement of discovery was tempered with a new uncertainty. That is one reason these exhibitions resonate for a present also recently unburdened of systems that pretended to provide universal answers. Freudianism has given way to a more ecumenical and inclusive view of the human psyche. Marxism has given way to a desire for liberal democracy that is both exhilarating and anxious because democracy is open-ended--a process, not an answer.

In Renaissance Germany and Italy, artists functioned as much as inventors, engineers and scientists as mere painters and sculptors. Albrecht Durer looked at the world with the eyes of an anatomist and naturalist. Nobody needs to be reminded of the range of Leonardo da Vinci’s genius. It’s amply demonstrated here, but one is particularly struck by his “Portrait of a Lady With Ermine.” Its depiction of man’s eternal fear of woman is so penetrating and so particular that we are reminded it took a civilization that put high value on the individual to eventually invent the art of psychoanalysis.

European art suffers in comparison to the spiritual power seen in that of virtually every other culture here, but it leaves little doubt as to who would have the drive and technology to launch a Columbus.

And so the great navigator set off. In terms of heroism, the exploration was testament to the fact that humankind is the most advanced animal ever to inhabit the planet--intelligent, resourceful, inventive. In terms of the sometimes disastrous historical chain reaction it fused, the exploration is testament to the species’ greatest failing--its inability to predict the ramifications of its actions.

Los Angeles takes up the story in the massive touring “Mexico” exhibition. The pre-Columbian section offers a panoply of mind-boggling evidence attesting to the magnificence and ferocious power of Olmec, Aztec and Mayan civilizations. It is awesome. But nothing in it is perhaps as dramatic as the point where one simply walks from one gallery to another and the whole thing just stops.

Suddenly gone are the implacable stone wrestlers, feathered serpents and regal rulers. Instead, we see carvings of Christian saints, paintings of the Virgin Mary, pious monks, embroidered costumes and comfortable armchairs. It’s as if an invader from outer space appeared and liquefied an entire people.

The invader was, of course, Columbus’ inheritor, Hernando Cortes. He spilled a lot of blood in Mexico, but no evil he intended was fractionally as tragic as outcomes he could not have foreseen. Most of the native population that died succumbed to diseases unwittingly imported by the conquistadors.

At such moments one is inclined to terminal disgust with the whole human species. None of its peoples, after all, have a corner on greed and rapacity. It seems that when we are not actively venal we are bumbling and thoughtless. How can anyone have hope for such a flawed evolutionary mutant?

Clues to an answer may lie in the modern section of the Mexico show. There we find an early Cubist painting by Diego Rivera. Cubism was the quintessential Modernist style. One of the hallmarks of Modernism has been its absorption and revivification of art from all other civilizations. Picasso absorbed African art. Later abstract artists were deeply inspired by Asian art. An architect like Frank Lloyd Wright built in Mayan style, and so forth.

Columbus began a spread of Western thought that galvanized other civilizations and opened the way for cultural cross-fertilization. The logic of such intellectual hybridization might eventually lead to a unified world civilization.

These two remarkable exhibitions speak directly to contemporary concerns with globalism and multiculturalism. If we compare where we are to where we were in 1492, there is some small evidence encouraging optimism.