ART REVIEW : ‘Drawings’: New Language for Vision : The County Museum’s ‘Italian Drawings 1350-1800’ marks the first time works from the legendary Graphische Sammlung Albertina have been seen outside Vienna.

The Los Angeles County Museum’s exhibition “Italian Drawings 1350-1800: Masterworks From the Albertina” represents the height of classic Italian draftsmanship. It offers about 80 works, including ones by such towering Old Masters as Michelangelo, Raphael, the Carracci, Bernini and G.B. Tiepolo. The works come from Vienna’s legendary Graphische Sammlung Albertina, one of the world’s most copious caches of connoisseurship. Launched in 1769 by Duke Albert of Saxony-Teschen and his wife, Marie Christine, the collection now includes a staggering 43,000 drawings.

This is the first time works from the Albertina have been shown outside its own confines. Previously displayed at Fort Worth’s prestigious Kimbell Art Museum, the show comes with a book-length catalogue by Veronika Birke that functions as a history of Italian drawings. It includes more than 260 reproductions, so clearly what we see on LACMA’s walls is but the tip of the pencil.

All the same, the ensemble is reassuring on a number of counts. In an epoch like our own that seems so stubbornly resistant to finding solutions to its mired troubles, it is heartening to be reminded that in 14th-Century Italy a new concept for civilization was discovered by simply noticing something that was already there--the classical past of Greece and Rome.

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Among the earliest images on view is “Allegory of Luxury” by Italy’s greatest master of International Gothic, Antonio Pisano, known as Pisanello. The work shows a sexy siren reclining near a charming little bunny. (We know what rabbits symbolize.) Her hair is in a big Afro; she’s not wearing anything. The surface-scheme of the drawing is typically Gothic-decorative but the anatomical details suggest the artist was working from at least a pastiche of observed understanding of the figure. The work is charming, seductive and unquestionably secular in mind-set. The Age of Faith was dimming out.

By the time we get to Michelangelo’s “Back of a Male Nude,” it’s at least a half-century later. Now the specificity of the complex muscular topography of spine and scapula leaves no question that the maker of this image had the advantage of precise, direct observation of human anatomy. Well, sure, why not?

Easy for us to talk, but when Buonarotti dissected cadavers it was a sin and a crime. The degree of cultural curiosity in the Renaissance became so acute that no amount of risk and daring seemed too much.

A new language for vision was invented. There is no better metaphor of the Renaissance than its worship of the human body, no more flexible vehicle for its discoveries than draftsmanship. Modern science was essentially launched by a sudden crucial need to know the body and how it works. You can extrapolate medicine, mechanical engineering and architecture from that question in a big hurry. Bernini’s drawing for his famous Baldacchino in St. Peters isn’t very inspired but it is about how the organic transforms into the structural.

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It’s been said the Renaissance traded in the liturgical question, “Why?” for the temporal question, “How?” So knowing how the body exists in time and space produced a critical need to measure. Thus the suave foreshortening of the lovers in Nicolo dell’ Abate’s “Jupiter and Amor.” Mathematics. Linear perspective. The realization that other things exist in this checkerboard of space like Stefano della Bella’s “Two Elephants.” Natural science.

The thought dawned that things at a distance aren’t seen as clearly as things close up. So there is air in Tintoretto, Tiepolo and Guardi’s “View of the Piazzetta in Venice.” Things at a distance became important. First the question of what’s beyond the oceans, then the wonder at what’s beyond the stars.

Renaissance drawing was handmaiden and fuel to a revolutionary civilization. These days we tend to focus on what we call “Renaissance Humanism,” the discovery of individuals as dependent on their surroundings but convinced of their status as a free-standing spiritual cosmos unique in the universe. The Greek mind would have curdled at that degree of hubris, but the way it comes across in Raphael’s noble and touching drawings makes it very attractive.

The Renaissance would not flinch from being itself. There is already individual character in a Tuscan School portrait of a prior. Humility lingers in the image of a boy’s face attributed to Antonello da Messina but the kid will outgrow it. By the 16th Century the possession of pride, dignity, power and ego was no longer limited to men, as is clear in Agostino Carracci’s superb “Portrait of a Noblewoman With Necklace and Standing Collar.”

Neither was seductiveness any longer an exclusively feminine trait. There is an epicene languor in the creamy skin and curved hip of Salviati’s “Apollo and the Slain Dragon.” By the 18th Century we see signs of the Enlightenment in Pietro Antonio Novelli’s “Study for the Head of a Young Man.” There are also marked symptoms of modern kink and neurosis in Mauro Gandolfi’s “Group of Three Heads; a Young Woman, a Boy and a Bearded Old Man.”

The freedoms claimed by the Renaissance psyche must have been at least as intoxicating as those we took in the ‘60s and probably just as confusing. No wonder we wound up needing Freud.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., through April 25, closed Mondays, (213) 857-6000.