Going Back in Time With ‘From Aragon and Castile’ : Art review: LACMA’s exhibition of “Triptych With Scenes of the Life of Saint George” and “The Last Supper” evoke a time when museums were places of contemplation.

The fascination of art lies importantly in the way its objects come encrusted with history. Sometimes this patina of time is a visual distillation of the events of the artist’s life, or of the roundelay of the object’s proud possessors. Sometimes it is a narrative told by the work or the details of its physical reality, its medical history, so to speak. This is the account of the way it was made and the way it aged.

Usually the saga of an art object consists of all these threads intertwined. It is thus with the County Museum of Art’s exhibition “From Aragon and Castile: The Restoration of Two Spanish Paintings From the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.”

That it consists of just two pictures may come as a disappointment to viewers suckled on the last decade’s cycle of opulent extravaganza. For those with longer memories it may evoke the days when museums were places of repose inhabited by objects to be cherished and contemplated.

The pictures are large and not particularly seductive, but compelling in their rarity and seasoned character. They’ve been recently cleaned and restored under the auspices of Joe Fronek, the museum’s senior paintings conservator, who wrote the exhibition’s informative brochure and organized the show in collaboration with curator of European painting and sculpture J. Patrice Marandel. It’s always fascinating to see old pictures with the same eyes--although not the same minds--as did their original viewers.

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In style the eldest of the two is an early, anonymous, 15th-Century retablo or altarpiece, “Triptych With Scenes of the Life of Saint George.” For senior L.A. art lovers it will evoke the ancient days when the museum was a cozy backwater tucked away in a corner of what is now the Museum of Natural History in Exposition Park. Its greatest claim to fame in those days was a substantial 1950 gift of Old Master and antique art from publisher William Randolph Hearst. This painting was part of the gift and prominently on display. It was in such sorry shape it’s never been shown in the Wilshire Boulevard facility.

New scholarship places its origin in the Huesca/Zaragosa region of Aragon. By advanced standards of the day the work is conservative, but details like the volumetric shading of the horse’s body suggests slow absorption of the pictorial ideas of such pioneer Italians as Paulo Uccello.

The retablo most closely resembles an enlarged manuscript illumination with its contorted, stylized space and use of gold and silver leaf for effect. St. George really is a knight in dully shining armor. The whole has the hard enameled surface created by egg tempera on wood. The effect is decorative but with an Expressionist twist that would evolve into the particular Spanish aesthetic taste for realism and death. One dimly senses Goya lurking here.

The legend of St. George and the dragon has been so secularized as to become almost a fairy tale. The compartmentalized, quasi-comic-strip layout of this picture paints a bloodier business. His legend developed in Byzantium and did include the rescue of a princess who was to be sacrificed to a dragon that held her kingdom in thrall. By tradition, St. George so cowed the beast the princess was able to lead him away like a lap dog on a leash and the saintly knight gave his reward to the poor.

The familiar event is depicted, but so is the often-forgotten part of the story that identifies the saint as a passionate Christian who lived under the violently anti-Christian Roman emperors Diocletian and Maximian. When the Roman consul arrested him for outspoken belief, the saint refused to recant and was therefore rewarded with torture before being beheaded.

By coincidence the other painting on view also involves a woman in distress. This time it is Mary Magdalen who lies prostrate before Jesus and his disciples in Pedro Berruguete’s “The Last Supper,” a recent gift from the Ahmanson Foundation. Painted near the end of the century it shows strong marks of Renaissance influence. The most physically striking are its size and texture. Near 6-by-10 feet, it echoes contemporary taste for heroic fresco painting. It imitates the dry, matte surface of wall painting using water-and-glue-base paint on linen known in Spain as Sarga. Evidently painted with the idea they would stay put, such pictures are rarely seen on account of their fragility. The only other such examples confidently ascribed to the artist are in Madrid’s Prado museum.

Like many other Spanish artists of his time, Berruguete left little biographical detail. It’s known he worked at the Italian court of Federico de Montefeltro in Urbino in 1477. The style of the painting echoes an Italian taste for Northern European art, then both refined and earthy.

A Gothic majesty of composition reflects in the frontal, symmetrical ranking of the figures. Jesus sits at its apex gesturing like an icon. By contrast the rendering of the disciples’ faces is tough and weathered. They look like workmen against their gold-leaf halos. The picture joins its predecessor in reminding us that death is near and intensely physical in the doing.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd.; to Sept. 18, closed Mondays, (213) 857-6000.