ART REVIEW : Small Things Mean a Lot at the Getty : Two exhibitions, ‘Little Pictures’ and ‘Harmonies of Heaven and Earth,’ reveal photos and illuminated manuscripts in miniaturized form.

High school kids used to carry around these fat wallets. They didn’t necessarily have any money in them. The bulk came from layers of plastic windows encasing myriad postage-stamp size photo portraits of friends. They were cherished like collections of mounted butterflies. To have them was somehow to possess the spirits of admired mates. The ultimate form of this for girls was a tiny picture of her steady in a locket.

Origins of this practice are reflected in two engaging jewel-box exhibitions at the J. Paul Getty Museum. “Little Pictures” and “Harmonies of Heaven and Earth” consist, respectively, of photos and illuminated manuscripts. Their subjects are different but they are crucially linked. Both are about the magic of miniaturization. Making things small has become a big issue in this culture. It touches everything from the computer chip to the general feeling of shrinkage in economically strapped times.

“Little Pictures,” selected from the permanent collection by curator Weston Naef, easily fits some 300 photos into a small gallery. The show chronicles its subject from 1848 to 1920, showing its rise as a popular novelty.

Primitive photographs were obliged to be small because the lenses that took them were. Sometimes images were literally taken through microscope glasses. The diminutive results charmed people by recording a lot of realistic detail that seemed perfect.

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It was fun and it carried the cachet of two rising cultural gods--mechanics and science. It was the 19th Century’s version of computer special effects and graphics. Look, Ma, I shrunk the world.

Teeny photos took many forms. Calling cards of and by photographer Camille Silvy and his wife are less portraits of them than of their best clothes. But there are little likenesses of everybody from Abraham Lincoln to Queen Victoria, Florence Nightingale, Annie Oakley and a famous daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe looking like a tortured genius. The beginnings of the celebrity snap.

The great hoot of the thing is the way an awesome scientific discovery comes toddling into the world in the swaddling of toy and carnival midway amusement. Naturally that always includes Little Egypt, so we have the version of the Naughty French Postcard. Easy to conceal from the missus.

Naturally such art must include something scary posing as something serious. So we have stereographs of skulls, dancing skeletons, a mouthful of syphilis and a woman with a skin rash so bad you can write your name in it. How disgusting. How delightful.

Anything calculated to bring a lump to the throat gets in the act, patriotic scenes, mighty new suspension bridges to make you proud of your country, fraternal organizations, adorable kids and a cat with a fiddle.

As if photography were not miraculous enough in itself, Boston photographer William H. Mummler did a brisk business in “Spirit Photography” until his mumbo jumbo was denounced as a fraud. Today we call his occult double-cross a double exposure.

It’s testament to the skill and enthusiasm of the photographers that all this kitsch remains fresh and authentically touching.

Photography, of course, didn’t invent miniaturization. Nobody knows who did but manuscript illumination is older and thus closer to the source. The Getty’s current exhibition of about 20 examples overtly deals with “Harmonies of Heaven and Earth: Musicians and Instruments in Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts.”

Concocted by curator Thomas Kren, it paints an exquisitely diminutive picture suggesting the sounds of the era wafting from such ancestral instruments as vielle, mandora, shawn, naker and the cymbala.

Fans of esoteric original instrument recordings will find all that fascinating. The rest of us can be entertainingly instructed by evidence of the rich workings of the medieval mind.

It clearly believed in the idea of expressing the macrocosm through the microcosm, witness fully worked-up scenes so tiny that viewers would do well to bring along their magnifying glass.

Yet these diminutive images deal with great ideas and they range broadly beyond the cliche view of a period entirely dominated by liturgical thought.

It’s certainly there in a 13th-Century psalter from Wurzburg. A page emblazoned with the initial “B” shows David divinely soothing King Saul with his harp while nearby he bloodily beheads Goliath.

The image suggests a decided moral ambivalence toward music that remains abroad today in recurrent controversies about dirty words hidden in rock lyrics and politically incorrect sentiments in rap rhymes.

A case of illustrations about the Apocalypse finds music simultaneously cast as the soundtrack for the crack of doom, the accompaniment of heavenly salvation and the trumpet of the wrath of God.

The next thing you know a late 15th-Century volume from Ghent, Vincent de Beauvais’ “Mirror of History,” harks back to ancient myth to cast music as the enchanting song of the sirens luring innocent sailors to their death.

A later French illumination of “The Consolations of Philosophy” by the Coetivy Master finds music dignified as among the mathematical disciplines. That seems right. Music is like math turned into sound. Like this art, its expressive value is not limited by size.

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* J. Paul Getty Museum, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu; “Little Pictures,” through March 6; “Harmonies of Heaven and Earth,” through March 10, closed Mondays, advanced parking reservations required (310) 458-2003.