ART : Showing ‘Em How It’s Done : In the 1600s, the Earl and Countess of Arundel invented grand tour art collecting--and set a standard for patronage everywhere.

Money! Power! Adventure! Ambition! That’s the story behind an exhibition opening Tuesday at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu.

“The Earl and Countess of Arundel: Renaissance Collectors” doesn’t take up much room. All 60 pieces in the show--including an intricate Roman carving on a tiny slice of carnelian, an illuminated manuscript, etchings by Wenceslaus Hollar of three dozen artworks, and paintings by Anthony Van Dyck, Correggio, Hans Holbein the Younger and Paris Bordone--are packed into one bay in the museum’s Medieval and Renaissance Gallery.

But the artworks tell a Hollywood-size story about one man’s acquisitive passion and how it influenced the history of art collecting.

The central character is Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel (1585-1646), whose appetite for fine art was financed by his wife, Aletheia Talbot, Countess of Arundel (circa 1590-1654).

Credited with launching the English tradition of collecting on grand tours of Europe, the Earl of Arundel acted as a cultural ambassador by promoting English achievements and making his eclectic art collection available to an unusually broad audience, according to David Jaffe, the Getty’s curator of paintings, who organized the show.

Buying far and wide, Arundel provided an English model of “what a collection should consist of,” Jaffe says. Unlike his peers, who acquired art to enhance their own status, Arundel was compelled by his interest in the works.

“Before his time,” says Jaffe, “a collection in England consisted of a lot of portraits of your ancestors.”

Arundel invited artists to his home and sent them off to Europe to study the masters. In a venture that foreshadowed modern reproductions and art books--conceived as a way to educate the public--he also compiled a “paper museum” of etched facsimiles of works he owned.

“Exactly why he did it, one will never know,” Jaffe says of Arundel’s collecting. “To some extent you can safely say he wanted to bring England in line with the princely collections of Europe, but it’s more complicated than that. He said he was doing it for the public benefit, to bring works of art out so that artists and people of virtue, as he called them, people who were really interested, could see them.”

The full extent of the Arundels’ holding is unknown, but an incomplete inventory compiled in 1655 listed 600 works, including 33 Titians, 17 Raphaels, 26 Parmigianinos, 44 Holbeins, 16 Durers and 55 Van Dycks. All this art--and more--was housed at the ancestral Arundel castle in Sussex, known to today’s film audience as a production site for Windsor Castle in “The Madness of King George.”

The Arundel tale would seem to be a natural subject for a major exhibition--not to mention a movie. But the story is little known outside professional art circles. And, according to Jaffe, the Getty’s small but ambitious presentation is the result of serendipity and a burst of energy, rather than the museum’s customary long-term planning.

‘T his show started off be cause of Paris Bordone’s painting, ‘Two Chess Players,’ ” Jaffe says.

The 1550-52 work, from the collection of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Berlin, has spent the last year being cleaned and restored at the Getty Museum’s conservation laboratory. In exchange for Getty conservator Mark Leonard’s labor and expertise, the museum had planned to display the painting in Malibu for a few months before returning it to Berlin.

But Jaffe had a better idea: “Rather than just whack it on the wall, I thought, ‘This is an Arundel painting. We’ve got some Arundel paintings. Let’s work round it.’ Then I started to think how we could show a bit more of this collector.”

The Arundels’ collection was sold after their deaths, and it is so widely scattered that reassembling it would be impossible. Even rounding up masterpieces formerly owned by the Arundels from museums in Kromeriz, Edinburgh, Dresden, Madrid, London and Frankfurt could take years. But Jaffe and his associates discovered that they could display an edifying range of works from Getty collections and loans from the Visitors of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and several private holdings.

This provided the Getty with a good excuse to put its Van Dyck portrait of Arundel under a spotlight and to introduce Correggio’s painting, “Head of Christ,” a new acquisition that has been cleaned and restored by conservator Yvonne Szafran. A painting and a drawing by Holbein, a Van Dyck drawing and a Leonardo da Vinci caricature also came from the museum’s coffers, while the Getty Center Special Collections loaned an illustrated book.

The carnelian carving, known as the “Felix Gem,” was borrowed from the Ashmolean, along with a masterful portrait of Arundel by Peter Paul Rubens that Jaffe calls “a Rolls-Royce drawing” and “perhaps the most vivid image we have of the Earl.”

John Paul Getty II, the son of the Getty Museum’s founder, loaned the illuminated manuscript, “The Gritti/Arundel Psalter of the Prince of Anjou.” Two other private collections provided a cache of etchings.

“Our show is not fully representative of the Arundel collection. That’s not our intention,” curatorial assistant Arianne Faber Kolb says. “We are just trying to give an idea of what was in his collection, and to especially focus on the idea of the paper museum, which no one has ever really done before. We will have three rows of prints, which will give everyone an idea of its magnitude.

“Arundel was really the first to have had etchings made from a collection and the first to have had etchings made after drawings,” she says. “He had all his Leonardo caricatures and all his Parmigianinos etched. He was bringing printmakers and etchers from Prague and from Holland . . . England didn’t have any. (The English) knew nothing about the art of printmaking in the early 17th Century.”

Arundel was also a pioneering collector of Greek and Roman marbles, and he dispatched agents to bring back treasures from Constantinople. The “Felix Gem,” which portrays the Rape of the Palladium, and etchings of marbles indicate Arundel’s interest in antiquities. Drawings, most notably Parmigianino’s “Three Studies of St. Jerome and St. Francis Conversing,” represent another side of the collector: his penchant for works that demonstrate an artist’s creative process.

“It was quite unusual for a non-artist to be interested in drawings like this,” Jaffe says of the Parmigianino. “Most collectors acquired what the Getty collects today, big presentation drawings, wall power, big statements. This work is much more about being intimate with the artist, looking at the process as he makes decisions, plays with the pose and with drapery.

“It probably was Arundel who created a taste for this kind of drawing in England,” he says. “It’s curious that, even at the end of the 17th Century, the English were the only ones collecting these unfinished drawings, rather than drawings that were made to look like photographic images.”

In his love of precious, fine objects and his lust to “get anything and everything,” Arundel was a typical collector, Jaffe says.

“They were all maniacs. The extraordinary thing about Arundel is that he had pretty good taste. His drawings collection was said to be the best in the world.”

* “The Earl and Countess of Arundel: Renaissance Collectors,” J. Paul Getty Museum, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu. Tuesday-Sunday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Admission is free, but advance parking reservations are required: (310) 458-2003. Through Nov. 5.