Revealing the ‘Sacred and Profane’ Renaissance

After the spectacular Getty Center’s recent launch, it’s good to remind ourselves of other local cultural treasures.

The Huntington will always be close to the top of such a list. Its current exhibition, “Sacred and Profane: Themes in Renaissance Prints and Illustrated Books,” provides a particularly pointed instance of its aesthetic heft.

With seeming effortlessness, gallery director Edward J. Nygren pulled together a couple of dozen rare books and about 100 prints, mainly from the Huntington’s own holdings. They form a show that would look at home in New York’s Morgan Library and cause lines to form at Midwestern museums.

Here such an event is taken so casually that the gallery was unable to find an underwriter for a publication. That’s an authentic pity.

Among the most impressive treasures displayed is a volume of the gallery’s “Kitto Bible.” Assembled in 1830 by a London book dealer, the whole consists of 60 volumes and encompasses 30,000 prints and several hundred drawings. These so-called “extra-illustrated” compendiums reflect a practice started in the 18th century. Amateurs (the experts of the day) cobbled together collections on various subjects. Volumes on view contain prints by artists as renowned as Botticelli, Durer, Holbein and Cranach.

The “Sacred” section pursues themes from the Bible. Because that great book includes quite a lot of profane stuff, there’s no lack of excitement. Among Old Testament themes we find various--sometimes humorously contrasting--interpretations of the face-off between David and Goliath.

The German Hanns Lautensack had a cartoon-like, peasant-like touch that shows the giant as a beetle-browed hulk certain the shrewd little youth can’t touch him. Just how wrong the lug could be is illustrated by Italian Giovanni Battista Scultori. He shows Goliath downed and decapitated while David furiously brandishes his sword.

New Testament themes appropriately concentrate on the life of Christ. Albrecht Durer’s numerous works repeatedly demonstrate how dangerous it can be to include an authentic genius among a group of artists who are just extremely gifted. Durer’s miniature scenes from “The Engraved Passion” have such intensity and precision that they draw the eye magnetically.

Among the handful of artists who give Durer something of a run is the Dutchman Lucas van Leyden. Works such as his “The Baptism of Christ in the Jordan” have a combination of modest accuracy and compositional unity that predict Rembrandt.

Those who take “profane” to designate dirty words and amorous adventure are likely to be momentarily let down by the Huntington’s version. It deals more with the secular than with the libidinous. All the same, there’s much that contradicts the image of the Renaissance as being all humanistic light and harmony, as seen in Marcantonio Raimondi’s “The Climbers.” Particularly during the Mannerist phase of the 16th century, the hallowed epoch evidenced a marked measure of what we’d call neurotic, obsessive and surreal.

These artists’ minds were wedged between the authority of the church, the seductions of the classical past and the dawn of modern science. To them the study of anatomy was an adventure into literally forbidden territory. To make the point, the exhibition includes Andreas Vesalius’ “Anatomical Man.” Said to mark the beginning of the modern age of anatomical research, the sheet on view illustrates a flayed man. Nerves, muscles and internal organs are rendered on separate bits of paper and overlapped to be lifted for a cutaway view.

Much of the surrounding art is nominally about classical subjects like Marco Dente’s “Laocoon” or Gian Giacomo Caraglio’s “Hercules Killing the Hydra of Lerna.” A glance is enough to reveal that the subjects were chosen to demonstrate the artists’ mastery of the exaggerated human form.

Exploration fueled a fascination with the natural world, as seen in an anonymous rendering of camels and an elephant. Evidence that the Renaissance mind still dwelt partly in medieval magic is seen in the inclusion of an animal that is either pure chimera or a precognition of the discovery of dinosaurs.

Portraiture aimed for an accuracy that was rarely flattering. Durer’s representation of Erasmus of Rotterdam finds the artist more interested in the philosopher’s cloak than in his face.

Pithy representation of social mores is seen in an anonymous representation of “Cripples, Fools and Musicians on Crutches or Wooden Legs.” It may be unkind, but it accords the figures more character than those of the artist known only as Master MZ. His view of a noble ball finds the participants completely antiseptic.

In the end, “Sacred and Profane” is a revealing, panoramic look inside the Renaissance mind.

* Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino; through April 19, closed Mondays, (626) 405-2141.