ART : A Mosaic of Multiculturalism : The Getty spotlights the diverse cultures that coexisted in the Persian city of Isfahan a few centuries before diversity became fashionable.

A couple of funny things happened on the way to displaying the J. Paul Getty Museum’s Armenian manuscripts. Instead of serving as the centerpiece of an Armenian show, as might have been expected, the Getty’s sumptuous illustrations of Bible stories became the impetus for an Armenian-Jewish-Persian exhibition that includes loans from five other institutions. And instead of inspiring a scholarly exploration of visual continuity in three cultures, the Armenian material sparked an investigation of aesthetic variety in a remarkablycosmopolitan city.

The resulting exhibition, “Book Arts of Isfahan: Diversity and Identity in Seventeenth-Century Persia,” opening Tuesday at the museum in Malibu, is something of an aberration.

Unlike a typical theme show that points out similarities between disparate artworks, this is a celebration of cultural differences that flourished in Isfahan from 1597 to 1722, whenthe city was the capital of Safavid Persia. It was ruled by the Safavid dynasty, which established Shiite Islam as the state religion of the territory that stretched between the Ottoman and Mughal empires and composes present-day Iran.

The exhibition features 27 works of art, including printed books, manuscripts and single leaves, created in a variety of styles and materials, ranging from glittering gold and vivid lapis lazuli paintings to delicate pen-and-ink drawings. Ten of the pieces come from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Nasli M. Heeramaneck and Edwin Binney collections; six are from UCLA’s Minassian collection. Additional loans are from the San Diego Museum of Art, the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington and the Library of the Jewish Theology Seminary of America in New York.

Tracking the evolution of the unusual exhibition, Thomas Kren, the Getty’s curator of manuscripts, said it began with a simple desire to display the museum’s Armenian manuscripts.

“We hadn’t shown them often enough,” he says. “So I was looking for a context to exhibit them.”

The manuscripts had languished in storage because the museum collects European--not Middle Eastern--art and doesn’t have enough Armenian material for a substantial exhibition. Indeed, the Getty probably would own no Armenian art at all if a richly illustrated gospel book hadn’t been part of the Peter Ludwig collection of 144 illuminated manuscripts, purchased by the museum in 1983.

But the challenge of putting the Getty’s tiny cache of Armenian manuscripts in the limelight offered an opportunity for Kren’s department to continue a series of shows exploring the art of the book in Southern California collections. He enlisted the help of Alice Taylor, a leading authority on Armenian art and culture who teaches at West Los Angeles College. She organized the exhibition and wrote its catalogue.

Taylor says she started the project with “an Armenian point of view” but soon expanded her horizons to the city of Isfahan. “I thought we could show what a very varied city it was.” Seventeenth-Century Isfahan was “a kaleidoscope of languages and religions” that served as “a crossroads of international trade and diplomacy, Christian missionary work and artistic exchange,” she says.

Looking for artworks that would illustrate the identities of different ethnic groups in Safavid Persia, she came up with Armenian printed books and illuminated manuscripts, illustrations in Judeo-Persian manuscripts and paintings from the circle of the Persian court. The Armenian and Jewish works illustrate how two minorities dealt with their own identities, while the court images offer insight into the rulers’ views of the city’s religious, linguistic and ethnic variety, Taylor says. Focusing on images of people created to define “both the self and the other,” she has attempted to reveal some of the complexities of Isfahan’s ethnically varied society.

The Jewish works, of which very few remain, were created by outsiders who could not afford to use gold and other precious materials in their artworks but connected themselves to the ruling elite by drawing on Persian literary and artistic traditions. Although Judeo-Persian illustration was essentially a secular activity, it reveals how a strongly Jewish community could also conceive of itself as Persian, Taylor says. The relatively wealthy Armenians, on the other hand, emphasized their own glorious past and attempted to position themselves as part of the larger Christian world while reaching out to European art.

The eclectic range of styles used by various Armenian artists--and sometimes compiled in single objects, such as the Getty’s Bible--range from the traditional to the modern. All the Bible’s illustrations are boldly executed, but Mesrop of Khizan and Hayrapet’s paintings of “The Baptism” and “Saint John Dictating His Gospel to Prochoros” are wildly expressionistic, while Malnazar and Aghapir’s works are relatively stiff.

In sharp contrast to the Armenian art, images from the Persian court are gracefully drawn, with a sure, light touch. Stylistically, they are quite consistent, but their subjects are enormously varied. Along with an image of a Persian gentleman reading in a landscape, who exemplifies the leisure class, there are depictions of foreigners and alien types: an Armenian bishop, a Turkish lady, an Indian maiden. Where some of these artworks appear to reflect a fascination with exotic styles and dress, the image of “A Captive Uzbek” portrays a foreign warrior in disgrace.

Still other artworks from the Persian court emulate European art, Taylor points out. A drawing of “The Prodigal Son” is an anonymous Persian artist’s rendition of a 1538 woodcut by German printmaker Hans Sebald Beham. Muhammad Zaman’s finely detailed painting “Majnun in the Wilderness” incorporates Renaissance space and other conventions common to European art.

Odd as some of the artworks may appear, the history of Persian painting is characterized by the coexistence of different styles, Taylor says. And this eclecticism--which was carried out in Isfahan’s household decor as well--was not viewed as a negative foreign influence but as a valuable attribute.

The theme of cultural diversity is, of course, both timely and familiar.

“Los Angeles is a city that delights in variety and amazing contrasts,” Taylor says. “Isfahan was a lot like Los Angeles, where we say, ‘Let’s have Cuban food tonight.’ The diversity is replicated here.”

That point will be made in the “Isfahan Family Festival,” to be presented entirely by local talent on four weekend days--today, Nov. 4, Dec. 2 and Jan. 7. Performances of Armenian music, Persian dance and Hebrew storytelling are scheduled in the museum’s gardens and courtyards. Demonstrations of miniature painting and Hebrew and Armenian calligraphy will be conducted in the main peristyle garden.

The series, produced by Community Arts Resources, gives the museum a chance to work with community organizations and offer a foretaste of educational programs that will be offered at the Getty’s new museum when it opens in Brentwood in 1997, says Diane Brigham, head of the Getty’s education department.

She notes that the show also represents “a wonderful opportunity to see a cross section of cultures that coexisted in Isfahan and to draw parallels with our time.”

“Although the images in the exhibition are so jewel-like and beautiful,” she says, “I wanted them to come alive so that people could really see and hear them and get a glimpse of a multicultural city in the 17th Century.”

* “Book Arts of Isfahan: Diversity and Identity in Seventeenth-Century Persia,” J. Paul Getty Museum, 17985 Pacific Cost Highway, Malibu. Tuesday through Jan. 6. Tuesdays-Sundays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. “Isfahan Family Festival”: today, Nov. 4, Dec. 2 and Jan. 7, 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Admission is free, but parking reservations are required: (310) 458-2003.