ART REVIEW : Getty’s ‘Women’ a Look at Shift in Image

Beginning in medieval times the image of women in the western world underwent a historic shift. That change is the subject of the Getty Museum’s “Devotion and Desire: Views of Women in the Middle Ages and Renaissance,” an exhibition of some 20 illustrated books from the museum’s collection.

Europe became a relatively kinder, gentler place as it pulled out of the long purgatorial dark age following the collapse of the Roman Empire. By the 8th Century, the Catholic mind was sufficiently at ease to focus on Jesus’ virgin mother, Mary, as the great exemplar of feminine virtue. (Male and female virtues were kept separate.)

The exhibition opens with a 13th-Century German Psalter turned to a page showing “The Tree of Jesse,” a kind of stylized representation of Jesus’ family tree. Mary is depicted at the very top of the hierarchy. Later books reflect arts’ turn to humanistic representation and Mary turns from an icon into an actual person. Although still symbolically larger than life, she occupies the same three-dimensional space as everyone else.

As veneration of the holy mother increased so did the intimacy of the way her life is shown. A 15th-Century French manuscript depicts her birth, an event not recorded in any of the Gospels.

Her kindness and courage are dramatized in an illumination showing her, surrounded by angels, giving communion to Saint Avila in prison. In purely aesthetic terms this wonderful, magic-realist composition from a Book of Hours illuminated by Jean Bourdichon is the most moving in the exhibition.

A Netherlandish text picturing the Last Judgment casts the Virgin in the role of benign go-between on behalf of humanity as God decides which souls will be saved and which damned.

Couched in the vulgar terms of the present, Mary became a celebrity, a role model. Other female saints took on new luster. St. Catherine of Alexandria was admired for resisting the slobbery advances of a Roman emperor, beating 50 pagan philosophers in debate and going--with aplomb--to her martyrdom on a razor-sharp wheel. Some women, at least, were allowed a profile of real heroism.

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The exhibition suggests that this new perception of women may have led to some augmented secular clout among those of noble lineage. A section devoted to patronage illustrates women’s apparently quite active role in commissioning books like those on view. However, when it came to translating the new character of Mary and the female saints into secular literature, women’s virtues remained the passive sort--chastity, modesty, loyalty, deference and all that.

Secularized, veneration of the Virgin became courtly love. The knight in shining armor rescued the damsel in distress but he was supposed to keep his claws off her. She was to be the unattainable object of endlessly unfulfilled desire, serenades, delicate verse and platonic distance. Acting human and breaking these rules could be fatal, as implied by a 14th-Century version of “The Story of the Good Knight Tristan.”

He’s shown dutifully delivering Isolde to her betrothed, King Mark. As every opera buff knows Tristan and Isolde were lovers and died for their passion. In tales like “The Romance of the Rose” the cult of courtly love became the cradle of romantic love.

Curiously, the visual interest of the exhibition slacks off in the section devoted to human desire, illuminations acting more as decorative embellishments than expressive elements.

A dramatic exception is a framed page from a history of Charles Martel. The title pretty well tells the story, “Vuitasse de Berry Abducts Ydoire From Lusarne Which Is Besieged by His Father Gloriant de Berry.”

Organized by graduate intern Adam S. Cohen, the exhibition is a straightforward scholarly exercise. It avoids polemic while humming with timeless tensions between the sexes, between the individual and the society, between art and life.

* J. Paul Getty Museum, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, through Oct. 8, closed Mondays, advance parking reservations required, (310) 458-2003.