Uncovering the Wonders, Perils of Conserving Art : Art: Most of the ‘Italian Panel Painting’ works have been displayed before. But for the first time, all of them are in one LACMA gallery--cleaned up and renewed.

If you are a regular at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, you have probably seen most of the 18 works in “Italian Panel Painting of the Early Renaissance.” Except for one panel by Marco Zoppo, borrowed from a private collection in Florence, all the works are in the museum’s permanent collection. And except for “Virgin and Child With Saints John the Baptist, Dominic, Peter and Paul” by Niccolo di Pietro Gerini--a 1947 gift that has languished in storage for as long as anyone at the museum can remember--all the LACMA-owned pieces have been on view.

But you have never seen all these paintings in one gallery, nor have you seen them looking so good. Fresh from the museum’s conservation center, the assembly of jewel-like, gilded paintings--accompanied by a catalogue--celebrates a little-known aspect of the collection and provides intriguing information about the pleasures and perils of conserving such delicate artworks.

The exhibition, which opens today, isn’t a Christmas show. The paintings portray saints and secular themes as well as the Holy Mother and Child, but they include a timely array of archetypal Christmas-card images. For a seasonal masterpiece, you need look no further than Jacopo Bellini’s glowing “Virgin and Child,” a 1985 gift of the Ahmanson Foundation.

“It’s a wonderful painting,” LACMA’s senior paintings conservator Joseph Fronek says of the Bellini. But he is also delighted with pieces by lesser-known artists that have emerged from a three-year effort to remove decades of grime and--in some cases--clumsy restorations or alterations that had obscured the works’ original beauty or the artist’s identity.

The painting now attributed to Niccolo, for example, was previously thought to be the work of another artist--Andrea di Giusto. And the outer wings of a portable triptych by Neri di Bicci had been painted with a marble pattern, covering the original floral design that corresponds to Neri’s depiction of the Virgin and Child inside the triptych.

“I had been interested in doing something with our Italian paintings for a long time,” Fronek says, “but it required a lot of hard work and a big chunk of time to do it.”

Inspired by an exhibition of 14th-Century Italian paintings at London’s National Gallery, he decided to conserve LACMA’s panel paintings and present them in a format that would balance art historical and technical information. Susan L. Caroselli, a former LACMA curator who currently teaches religion and the arts at Yale Divinity School, wrote the catalogue, with contributions from Fronek and senior research scientist John Twilley.

Financial support came from the Ahmanson Foundation, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, museum patron Rosa Liebman, the Getty Grant Program, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Support Endowment Fund, and Alitalia Airlines provided transportation. Several Italian painting specialists were imported to apply their expertise and consult with LACMA’s staff, turning the museum’s conservation facility into a temporary Renaissance center.

The results are on the museum’s walls and in the catalogue, which provides an introduction to Italian panel paintings and documents LACMA’s examples. In addition, the publication tracks the complexities of cleaning and restoring two major altarpieces, “Virgin and Child Enthroned With Saints Nicholas and Paul” by Sienese artist Luca di Tomme, and “Christ on the Cross With Saints Vincent Ferrer, John the Baptist, Mark and Antoninus,” by a Florentine artist known as the Master of the Fiesole “Epiphany.”

“We decided to focus on these two works because they are major pieces in the collection, both in scale and importance,” Fronek says. “Also, as rectangular tabernacle paintings, they have a similar format.”

In addition, the two altarpieces lend themselves to comparisons of style and technique over a period of about 130 years, he says. Painted around 1367-70, Luca’s “Virgin and Child” provides an early example, in sharp contrast to the Master of the Fiesole “Epiphany’s” 1491-95 altarpiece. Catalogue reproductions of the works before they were cleaned, along with ultraviolet and infrared photographs taken during conservation, offer dramatic visual proof of the paintings’ transformation.

“Italian Panel Painting” is billed as a temporary exhibition because the borrowed piece must be returned, but the display will remain essentially intact as a permanent installation.

That’s as it should be, according to Fronek: “This was a thorough undertaking that gave us a chance to really look at all of the Early Renaissance Italian paintings, study them, restore them, do a catalogue and re-present them to the public. I feel really good about doing an in-depth study of part of the collection that hasn’t been very well known.”

* “Italian Panel Painting of the Early Renaissance,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000. Tues.-Thurs., 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Fri., 10 a.m.-9 p.m.; Sat. and Sun., 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Admission: adults $6, students and seniors $4, children over 5 years of age $1. Ends March 12.