ART REVIEW : A Birthday Present for a Cultural Catalyst : A Getty show’s primary purpose is to join other yearlong events in a celebration of Franklin D. Murphy, one of L.A.’s most respected leaders.

The best exhibitions are not necessarily those that come with blockbuster bunting and pompous public service spots on PBS. There is a lot to be said for small, smart exercises that sidle up sideways and whisper poetry in your ear. Tickles.

One such is “Renaissance to Risorgimento: An Exhibition of Italian Books and Manuscripts in Honor of Franklin D. Murphy.” Organized by USC’s Victoria Steele, it’s a miniature 25-work etude installed in the 7th-floor lobby of the Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities in Santa Monica.

Its primary purpose is to join other events in a yearlong celebration of one of L.A.’s most respected cultural leaders on his 75th birthday. As museum trustee, UCLA chancellor and director emeritus of Times Mirror Co., Murphy has fashioned an awesome record as a cultural catalyst in the building of museums, libraries, collections and scholarship. Since his encyclopedic scan of interests includes a particular soft spot for things Italian, this exhibition is entirely apt.

Secondarily, the show is a slightly self-congratulatory demonstration of the Getty’s scholarly motives in collecting rare manuscripts. It likes to acquire material en bloc so that it stays together rather than being dispersed by the economic winds of the auction block. It likes to collect unstudied and unpublished manuscripts to provide fresh ground to be broken by scholarly brains. Perfectly admirable.

But in the end, art exhibitions need their own legs. Conscious intention is always subverted by human imagination. Happily this one has the tinkling magic of walking around in a Joseph Cornell box. It functions less as a show of manuscripts than one of precious baubles and historic memorabilia with intimations of the metaphysical.

One page folds out to an eight-foot tall image of Trajan’s column as recorded by the 18th-Century artists Giambattista and Francesco Piranesi. It offers the enchantment of being at once an overscaled book and a miniaturized model.

A previously unexhibited drawing by the renowned 17th-Century architect Francesco Borromini is a schematic concept for the cupola of S. Ivo alla Sapienza. It looks less like a construction plan than a concentric mandala of the cosmos.

Francesco di Giorgio Martini probably had pure mechanics in mind when he did his engineering drawings. Leonardo da Vinci was impressed enough with them to own a copy. But viewed today they take on some of the psychosexual overtones of the machine images of Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. It’s something about the drawing style.

We associate the decorative brown-ink line of the Renaissance so closely with the past that anything that alludes to it seems to speak of honeyed memory. Maybe that’s why Giulio Bargellini’s designs for the Victor Emmanuel II monument bring Giorgio di Chirico to mind. It’s absolutely right that metaphysical surrealism was invented in Italy. The place is all about grand reminiscence. It even affects the sweet directness of Luigi Tortoli’s 18th-Century cut-away view of a barn. It, in turn, is impossible to look at without thinking of the contemporary architect, Aldo Rossi . Eternal country.

It’s perfectly fair to view this exhibition as a serious scholarly exercise but it’s not as much fun as looking at a handwritten contract between an artist and his patron and thinking about Saul Steinberg’s satirical documents.

Students of history are allowed to salivate at a vitrine of unstudied materials that includes jewelry designs, pawnshop receipts and papal bulls. The vagabond singer within will have a better time. He will muse about how quickly and economically the juxtaposition becomes a lyric about the human spirit happily tempted to earthly delights--until the bill comes.

Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humaniti es , 401 Wilshire Blvd . , 7th floor, Santa Monica, (310) 458-9811, Ext. 4177, through Dec. 19. Closed Sundays.

Other current exhibitions and events in the series include : “Manuscripts and Americans” at the J. Paul Getty Museum, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, (310) 458-2003, through Oct. 18 . Closed Mondays. Parking reservations required.

“Dolphins and Anchors, Cats and Mice: Selections From the Ahmanson-Murphy Aldine & Italian Print Collection , “ UCLA University Research Library, call UCLA Visitor’s Center, (310) 206-8147, through Dec. 31.

A symposium “Celebrating American Collectors of Rare Books and Manuscripts,” co-sponsored by UCLA and the Getty Trust. Information: (310) 459-7611 , Ext 255. Oct. 15-18.