ART REVIEW : ‘Saints’ and ‘Myth’ Illuminate at the Getty

What good is old art, anyway? A couple of vest-pocket special exhibitions at the J. Paul Getty Museum pose the question. One concerns the lives of saints in an age of faith. The other addresses ancient myths of pagan gods at a time when humankind loved itself expansively. Since today we believe in little and hold ourselves in considerable contempt, how can such art seem anything but quaintly outdated?

“The Cult of Saints in the Middle Ages and Renaissance” was organized by curatorial assistant Kurtis Barstow. It presents painted books made in Europe between the 13th and 16th centuries. Thematically the exhibition deals with the veneration of real people whose piety was believed to lend them miraculous powers. A 15th-Century book of hours depicts St. Denis holding his own head after it was decapitated in Paris in the 3rd Century. According to the story, he then carried it to his burial site where the great Abbey of St. Denis was later built.

We see the veneration in which such divines were held in a 15th-Century Cologne manuscript image of St. Anthony Abbot blessing animals, the sick and the poor. The tiny painting puts him on a pedestal surrounded by the faithful, their faces shining with awe. Today’s secular mind may find all this touching but a tad hard to identify with.

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What does, however, carry across the centuries is a mentality embedded in every square centimeter of each of these illuminated pages. The monkish artists who made this wonderful stuff worked as if time did not exist. In this art there is no clock, no deadline, only a reflective stillness where things move no faster than a melting candle with an eternal flame.

There was time to elaborate and simplify reality into a kind of celestial fantasy. An artist from the workshop of the Pseudo-Jacquemart de Hesdin painted an image of St. John holding a lamb in the wilderness. Hardly larger than an oversize postage stamp, the starry sky in the background becomes a silver and gold checkerboard.

In 14th-Century Florence, someone called Pacino di Bonaguida made “The Chiarisio Tabernacle” into a work of obdurate visual power and dense reflection. On a striking black background he painted the narrative of the passion in reverse order to make his theme of redemption come out on top. He reflected that the holy blood flowing from the Trinity would reach the receptive faithful, but not everyone would be saved. He was musing on the advanced liturgical thought of the day. He was artistically philosophical, as would be Malevich after him.

This other conception of time, this nullification of chronology, is a given of all artistic striving for larger meaning. It is something we can profit from as the nightly news tries to persuade us that the happenings of this fleeting day were the most important in all history.

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The pulse of the clock augments to an almost familiar pace in “The Power of Myth: European Mythological Drawings of the 15th Through the 19th Century.” The ensemble, put together by associate curator Lee Hendrix, acts as a healthy reminder that radical new thought can result from artistic revivals.

Gradually losing faith in faith, the European Renaissance revivified the ancient Greco-Roman world to arrive at secular modern humanism.

The idea was, increasingly, to identify characters in a work of art as ancient deities to cover the celebration of modern humankind at its best. Italian Mannerist Jacopo Pontormo might have told the local censor that his superb drawing of a nude male torso was Hercules or Mercury, but it was really a flesh and blood hunk dynamically depicted, now rock-solid, now enveloped in atmosphere.

Northern Europeans like Jan Harmensz Muller or Abraham Bloemart may have palmed off their embracing nude couples as Mars and Venus, but there is a fleshy reality about them that belies their mythological status. One pair, due to a risible Mannerist stylization, looks as if they have the pox. Gee, gods get venereal diseases.

You can see the live model behind Alessandro Algardi’s 17th-Century “Aphrodite on a Chariot.” By the 18th-Century the scale of the rococo makes manifestly clear that Francois Boucher’s reclining nude has metamorphosed from nymph to nymphet.

By the 19th-Century, Goya had fun making fun of the whole charade in a depiction of Pygmalion and Galatea in modern dress. Delacroix’s rich, flashy pastel “The Education of Achilles” looks like a still from a contemporary adventure flick. Gee, he made that centaur look really real.

In the scant seven centuries bracketed by these exhibitions, humankind turned the clock into a whirling dervish. Perhaps clued by the elevation of people to sainthood, we promoted ordinary humans to act as our gods. We call them “stars” and trash them with irreverent regularity.

Old art is good. It reminds us that things were not always like this and do not have to go on being like this.

* J. Paul Getty Museum, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway. “The Power of Myth,” through Dec. 26; “The Cult of Saints,” through Jan. 9. Closed Mondays. Advance parking reservations required: (310) 458-2003.