ART : Making the Gods Mind Their Manners : Dutch engraver and painter Hendrick Goltzius could make the otherworldly palpable and theistic authority shameful

Although he was Northern Europe’s most eloquent practitioner of Mannerist art, it’s been a while since the name of Hendrick Goltzius has set off many bells. The Dutch engraver and painter enjoyed enormous popular success at the turn of the 17th Century, when his sensuously intricate art was widely coveted. But as the Mannerist style was eclipsed, he was steadily relegated to ever-darker shadows.

For Goltzius’ reputation, the problem was acute. In the Netherlands, exotically Mannerist painting had the misfortune to be usurped by a form of Realist art that, at least on its face, couldn’t have been more different in its aspirations and achievements. His position at the pinnacle was followed by no less a figure than Rembrandt.

The fact that fewer than 50 paintings by Goltzius’ hand are known hastened his decline into relative obscurity. A hugely successful printmaker, his theatrical visual style had seen wide distribution; but, in 1600, at the age of 42, he abruptly gave up the printing medium. His output as a painter during his remaining 17 years was modest.

Whatever prominence in the history books the elder painter was to maintain was due largely to his landscape drawings. They’re praised as innovative, because they’re among the first of what was to become the hugely popular 17th-Century genre of plein-air representations of the Dutch countryside.

Lately, the narrow esteem in which the artist has long been held has started to widen a bit. Hendrick Goltzius isn’t exactly in vogue again, but his art is starting to speak to us in ways it hasn’t before.

In 1990, one of Goltzius’ rare paintings was acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It became the centerpiece of a small but appreciatively noted exhibition of related prints and drawings that closed at the museum in February. Now, a second, similar kind of show has opened in Los Angeles, although here the venue is quite different. Prepare to log some mileage, for the absorbing exposition is taking place at three institutions scattered between downtown and Malibu.

Goltzius’ spectacular painting “Jupiter and Danae” (1603) was acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1984. The complex composition is filled with a never-ending string of surprises, which together add up to a dizzyingly sexy essay on the dangerous pursuit of pleasure.

For a “Masterpiece in Focus” presentation, which remains through April 25, the radiant, newly cleaned canvas has been paired with a small wash drawing in brown ink, lent by Sacramento’s Crocker Art Museum. The little image shows a seraphim hovering over a pot of coins. Titled “Honor Above Gold”--a wry play on the artist’s auric last name--it served as Goltzius’ personal emblem.

The drawing is related to the big LACMA painting, which depicts the moment a smitten Jupiter transformed himself into a shower of gold dust, in order to slip through the ceiling cracks and enter the locked bedchamber of the voluptuous, sleeping Danae. The Roman gods were nothing if not ingenious. Artistically, Goltzius turned out to be their clever equal.

A show of “16th-Century Northern European Drawings” at the J. Paul Getty Museum (through May 3) demonstrates how. It includes two of his works on paper, one a black chalk drawing of the bust of an angel, the other a 1585 model for an engraving. Both convey the German-born expatriate’s extraordinary gift for making evanescent, otherworldly experiences strangely palpable.

The ink study for an engraving is, like the LACMA painting, a scene of godly lust--an adulterous Venus and a philandering Mars, caught in the act by a cuckolded Vulcan. There is more going on in its few square inches of paper than in most wall-size frescoes: the dramatic discovery of the illicit act, the swooping arrival of a host of mocking gods, the heavy labors at Vulcan’s nearby forge.

Yet, like jump-cuts in a movie, the crashing together of these packed, disjunctive spaces creates a complex narrative occurring over an extended period of time. Goltzius tells his story in a wildly exciting, oddly modern way.

The exquisite bust, which dates from about a decade later, is far simpler in design. It shows a monumental, impishly elegant head, deftly orchestrated to glance over its winged shoulder. The angel’s windblown hair vigorously sweeps your eye across the page and up into the curving fragment of wing, creating a remarkable feeling of vaporous uplift for the airborne figure.

The largest segment of the tripartite show is the survey of 88 Goltzius prints at USC’s Fisher Gallery (also through May 3). Organized by graduate students under the supervision of gallery director Selma Holo and Prof. Glenn Harcourt, and with a catalogue both thorough and concise, “Hendrick Goltzius and the Classical Tradition” admirably manages to demonstrate a circuitous but crucial path followed by the artist.

Goltzius, who was born almost 40 years after the death of Raphael, reveled in Mannerist artifice as a wide-open avenue for self-invention. The striking, exaggerated visual effects of the internationally important style meant to complicate and reform the classical grandeur of High Renaissance art.

The artist had been born into an artistic world whose living giant was the elder Michelangelo, the painter who had ushered in the Mannerist style. So, classicism stood as a restrictive set of old-fashioned, out-of-date rules for Goltzius--at least, they did until 1591, when he made a fateful trip to Rome.

During his eight years or so in Italy, surrounded both by Renaissance permutations of antique classical style and by countless examples of its ancient origin, stale tradition was transformed into a living presence. In the first room at the Fisher Gallery the classicist tradition is everywhere in evidence, from engravings based on paintings by Raphael to those depicting such famous works of ancient statuary as the Apollo Belvedere.

In Rome, Goltzius didn’t entirely lose his affinity for Mannerist exoticism. His engraving of the Farnese Hercules, seen from behind, sharply exaggerates the bulging musculature of the original antique sculpture. And the technical accomplishment of his graphic work always retains a Northern European feel, akin to such influential predecessors as Albrecht Durer and Lucas van Leyden.

Instead, the significance of his Roman sojourn is in the way Goltzius’ firsthand experience of classicism was to deepen the resonant maturity of his eventual return to Mannerist style. Because Mannerism meant to undermine the classical limitations of High Renaissance art, Goltzius first needed to achieve fluency in the classical language.

LACMA’s “Jupiter and Danae,” painted several years after his return to Holland, might glow with a roseate hue indebted to the painter’s Venetian encounter with the art of Titian (who painted several famous versions of the subject). But, the tone of Goltzius’ interpretation of classical Roman mythology is inescapably Northern, not Southern.

The painting is frankly weird--weird in the old sense of suggesting supernatural, mysterious and ghostly things. A phantasmagoria of rich and sensual surfaces describes a bewilderingly complex cross-referencing of details.

“Jupiter and Danae” features two main protagonists. Goltzius has added a variety of other duos to elucidate their central seduction, and to radically alter the typically accepted meaning of the myth. These pairs conspire to make a painting of unusual impact.

On the floor next to the sleeping beauty stands a clear crystal bowl, plainly symbolizing Danae’s purity, and an upright gilded chalice, decorated with wild Bacchanalian revelries and Jupiter’s emblem, an eagle. With these, the stage is set.

Diagonally opposite, at the upper left of the canvas, a male and a female cherub clutch bags of gold--sacks whose likeness to sexual organs is unmistakable.

Beneath these cherubs, at Danae’s feet, a treasure chest filled with coins is decorated, like the chalice, with eagles. The chest is slowly opening, in a delicate echo of the crimson-satin drapery at the upper right, which is being opened to reveal Danae’s luxurious body.

At the center of the canvas, nearly hidden away amid the dense array of limbs, drapery and grinning faces at the picture’s heart, Goltzius places the most shocking pair of all. Danae’s elderly maid, who gently tries to awaken her sleeping mistress, holds a golden bowl to catch the shower of coins about to fall across Danae’s creamy flesh.

The radiant bowl forms the twin of the crone’s veined and pointedly exposed breast adjacent--an extraordinary conjunction of sex and corruption that is further underscored by the leering face of Mercury above. Mercury, of course, is the Roman god of commerce.

Goltzius’ “Jupiter and Danae” is a radical reworking of the standard Roman myth, in which Danae’s mystical impregnation by an all-powerful god was divined by later Christian doctrine to be a prefiguration of Mary’s virgin impregnation. Here, the artist depicts purity about to be sullied by greed, wealth and power. The image of mercenary love is a stunning rebuke to theistic authority, by an artist lately returned from Rome.

A rather big gulf separates an exotic picture of baser lusts and plein-air landscape drawings of the Dutch countryside, for which the artist is now known. Both are animated by a commitment to the world of human nature, but the high regard reserved for Goltzius’ landscape drawings (none of which are included in these shows) is largely based on a formal conviction that favors naturalism in art above all else. In fact, as LACMA’s painting and this engaging triple-bill show, it’s the artist’s skill as a brilliant revisionist of established creed and doctrine that speaks most persuasively to the present day.