ART REVIEW : The Still Life’s Great Leap Forward : Getty Show Traces Origin of the Genre to Manuscript Illumination

Where did still-life painting come from? As an independent genre, the depiction of fruits and flowers, tableware, books and musical instruments was a relatively late arrival to the family of subjects in Western painting. The odd example can be cited as far back as classical antiquity, but not until the 17th Century (and then principally in the Netherlands) did still life move from the modest role of supporting player into the dramatic foreground.

A remarkable new show at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu goes a very long way toward answering that vexing puzzlement. And it does so in ways that are keenly insightful, frequently beautiful in their examples and not a little astounding in their guiding premise.

Symbolic depictions of still-life objects--a white lily in a transparent glass vase, for example, discretely placed at the feet of the Virgin Mary--have been around for centuries. They occupied important if peripheral positions in countless works of medieval and early Renaissance art. Yet, paintings that focus all visual care and central attention on a tomato or a floral bouquet menaced by a caterpillar or an unusually prickly gourd were a very long time in coming.

When they came, however, they came with a vengeance. As no doubt befit the booming mercantile culture of 17th-Century Holland, a kind of “bureaucratization” of still-life painting rapidly evolved.

Painters soon specialized in certain motifs, highly refining their techniques, the better to capture fiercely competitive market share: Pieter Claesz and Willem Heda rendered radiant breakfast pieces, painters in Leyden (a university town) specialized in displays of books and manuscripts, Abraham van Beyeren regularly laid out lavish banquet tables, Willem Kalf went after wealthy (rather than bourgeois) clientele with sumptuous images incorporating exotic utensils in gold, silver and porcelain.

And perhaps most popular of all, flower pieces--from Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder’s abundant vases early on to countless examples into the next century--were the sine qua non of the still-life genre. A visit to the L.A. County Museum of Art’s current exhibition, “A Mirror of Nature: Dutch Paintings From the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Edward William Carter” (through Jan. 17), gives magnificent evidence of the range and technical bravura that soon marked the new genre.

The sheer quantity and broad public popularity of 17th-Century still-life painting--and of its plentiful offspring in the several centuries since--has always made the question of its origins an interesting one. Typically, explanations of its emergence have zeroed in on the dramatic reorganizations of social life that accompanied the new genre’s arrival.

The answers have been varied and apt: the rise of Protestantism, with the attendant decline of religious subject matter; the emergence of a merchant class, which sought to see its own pursuits of pleasure reflected in art; a new scientific interest in precise classification of nature, which challenged artists to refine their visual skills, and more.

Yet, something always seemed to be missing from the tale. The leap of still life from obscurity into prominence was rather sudden, almost as if it had been born, Athena-like, full grown from the head of Zeus. An intermediary step (or steps) appeared to have vanished. Amid the plethora of social explanations, where was the visual evidence of the process of movement away from the periphery into the center of the artistic field?

The Getty show reveals one major but previously missing stride, and it does so by shining a bright light into a surprising and hitherto dark corner: manuscript illumination.

When you think of this genre you immediately think of the Middle Ages, not the Renaissance and beyond, when hand-written, hand-painted decoration of liturgical books was finally usurped by the revolution of the printing press. In post-Gutenberg Europe, illuminated manuscripts were rather like an appendix in the body of art: identifiable, yes, but with no apparently pressing function.

Or, so it seemed. The Getty exhibition proposes otherwise, in a small but utterly absorbing presentation that gathers together a variety of objects from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. There are seven illuminated manuscripts, five drawings, 13 printed books and two paintings.

The centerpiece is a showy, astonishingly beautiful and, as it turns out, critically important manuscript--the Mira calligraphiae monumenta , or Model Book of Calligraphy--whose sumptuously written text was penned by the extraordinary calligrapher Georg Bocskay, in 1561-62, and whose exquisite and often clever illuminations were painted 30 years later by the last great Flemish manuscript painter, Joris Hoefnagel.

This is Hoefnagel’s show. “Art and Science: Joris Hoefnagel and the Representation of Nature in the Renaissance” is the first exhibition anywhere devoted to his art, and it coincides with the Getty’s recent issuance of a lovely facsimile edition of the manuscript. Featuring perceptive and clearly written texts by Hoefnagel scholars Lee Hendrix and Thea Vignau-Wilberg, and an introduction by Getty curator of manuscripts Thomas Kren, it is an auspicious debut for the museum’s facsimile program. (With 170 excellent colorplates reproducing every page at actual scale, it’s also a bargain--in spite of a seemingly hefty price of $125.)

This late 16th-Century model book is a kind of electrified battleground, a highly charged site for a heady display of aesthetic one-upsmanship. Bocskay had been invited to write the calligraphy by Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I, and he used the occasion to pull out all the stops.

Meant to be looked at, rather than actually read, the text is written in a wide variety of elaborate styles, frequently enlivened by mind-boggling interlaces, elegant flourishes and embellishments of gold and silver. Sometimes he wrote his text in mirror-writing or in microscopic size, which couldn’t be read at all, except with lenses and at great effort.

As a model book, the extravagantly handwritten manuscript was meant to be an authoritative source. Hovering in the background of Bocskay’s extraordinary achievement was the threat--and the liberation--presented by the mechanical printing press.

As Hendrix’s essay declares, before the advent of the printing press handwritten books were concerned with the preservation of texts; after, printed books were about their dissemination. An obvious tension vibrates between these different forms with differing purposes. Bocskay’s sovereign exercise, created for the pleasure of the emperor in a world being newly engulfed by the force of the printed word, insisted Ferdinand I was keeper of the dazzling “model,” from which all textual authority would flow.

Thirty years later, long after Bocskay’s death, Ferdinand’s grandson, Emperor Rudolf II, gave the manuscript to Hoefnagel to decorate. Why Bocskay had left ample blank space on many of the written pages nobody knows for sure (he may have intended the text to be illuminated in some way), but Hoefnagel plainly saw an opening--and he ran with it.

Entrusted with these astonishing folios, Hoefnagel set about painting exquisitely detailed pictures of fruits, flowers, vegetables, insects and, once in a while, a small animal, all in a manner that would draw the eye and mind away from the grandeur of the calligraphy, subverting its authority. Hoefnagel wanted to assert the primacy of the purely visual, and he chose natural elements as the vehicle.

In the exhibition, six illuminations from 15th- and early 16th-Century handmade books show how plants and insects were commonly used as border decorations. At the same time, artists were beginning to isolate these very elements for scrutiny in their paintings. Albrecht Durer’s astonishing watercolor of a seemingly sentient “Stag Beetle” (1505) represents the apogee of this development: Probably drawn from a dead specimen, the brilliance of its illusionism is such that it looks as if the bug could leap off the page.

Another watercolor--and an unanticipated bonus in the show--is German painter Martin Schongauer’s luscious rendering of crimson peonies in assorted poses and states of blossom, which was executed around 1473 as a study for “Madonna of the Rose Garden,” his celebrated altarpiece in Colmar. This drawing is the earliest known life study in all of Northern European art, and was acquired quietly, without fanfare, by the Getty a few months ago.

What Hoefnagel did in his elaborate illuminations for the model book was to move such marginal renderings of plants and insects out from the backgrounds of paintings and away from the supporting borders of traditional manuscripts and onto pictorial center stage. There, through scale, color, precision and even witty composition, they dominate the page.

When you look at Hoefnagel’s daring illuminations of Bocskay’s extraordinary book of calligraphy--paintings made on an existing work of art that, page after page, never make a misstep--you begin to understand the immensity of the artist’s conviction and achievement. He lavished them with the same focused scrutiny that characterized the watercolor studies made earlier by Schongauer and Durer. And not long after this extraordinary conceptual shift was completed, still-life painting began to come into its own as an independent entity.

It would be too much to draw a straight line from, say, Schongauer and Durer through the decorative borders of manuscripts to Hoefnagel, and then on to still-life painters like Ambrosius Bosschaert and to the printed scientific manuals that began to proliferate. History doesn’t work in neat, linear ways, and the Getty show does not imply as much. Instead, it has gathered together a kind of ambient cloud of cultural and artistic forces, in which Hoefnagel’s manuscript illuminations, made for perhaps the most important patron of the day, act like a lightning bolt announcing a thunderclap, which is followed by an abundant shower.

All 14 paintings and drawings are from the museum’s own collection, while 13 printed books have been loaned by its sister institution, the Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities. The exhibition is quite small, but it amply demonstrates how significant the museum’s collections are becoming. Pivotal works of art--the Schongauer, the Durer, the Hoefnagel, an early Bosschaert--collectively have the capacity to chart broad territory. With this show, the field they outline is likely to have been forever altered.

J. Paul Getty Museum, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, through Jan. 17; closed Mondays. Parking reservations required: (310) 458-2003.