Rescuing an Old Master

Rarely can an exhibition of Old Master art be approached with a sense of almost total discovery, so thoroughly tilled are the fields of Western art history. At the J. Paul Getty Museum, however, “Adriaen de Vries, Imperial Sculptor” offers just such an uncommon experience.

At the peak of his career, the Dutch-born De Vries (1556-1626) enjoyed the patronage of courts from Turin to Prague. Today he is virtually unknown outside a narrow scholarly community.

Rarer still, the exhibition in question examines an Old Master sculptor, not a painter. Sculpture before the Modern era is almost never addressed in major international museum exhibitions. (According to the Getty, the last one took place some 20 years ago, in a survey of the Florentine Mannerist--and De Vries’ even more gifted mentor--Giambologna.) This show does for De Vries what the Getty’s “Dosso Dossi: Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara” did for Dosso last spring: Building on two significant works in the museum’s collection, it assembles an unprecedented display of an often remarkable body of work and restores to prominence a hitherto obscure artist.

Just how remarkable is evident straightaway, in the monumental sculpture placed at the show’s entrance. “Psyche Borne Aloft by Putti” (1590-1592) is the first large bronze De Vries made for Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, his great patron in Prague. Based on a Roman story by Apuleius, the sculpture shows a life-size figure of the beautiful maiden being hoisted heavenward to Mt. Olympus on the wings of three chubby cherubs.

The sculpture is a dazzling demonstration of the difficulties involved in overcoming the two great enemies of most classical sculptors: gravity and stasis. De Vries’ double dilemma was the same for Michelangelo working in marble before him, as it is for Richard Serra working in rolled steel today. An almost alchemical manipulation of materials was required for De Vries to convincingly portray in bronze a sense of living figures--even if they’re mythological.

Physically, the ensemble is supported on a structural armature hidden inside the flowing drapery that falls gently to the pedestal, allowing both of Psyche’s feet to leave the ground. Visually, the illusion of gravity-defying movement is more complex.

To accomplish the magic, De Vries began to elaborate the Mannerist compositional device of the spiral curve, which he learned in Giambologna’s workshop. Psyche’s forward leg thrusts to the left as her head turns to the right. Her gracefully bent and outstretched limbs--not just arms and legs, but splayed fingers and toes as well--seem to twist around her rotating body.

Meanwhile, the corkscrew placement of the pudgy cherubs emphasizes the torque: one upside down beneath a thigh, one facing forward under the raised left arm and one facing backward under the raised right arm. 3, 2, 1 . . . liftoff!

A composition based on a spiral curve automatically lifts your gaze upward, while also letting you imagine you’re seeing the figure from more than one angle at once. Downplaying frontality means you can’t always anticipate what another side will look like, inciting perambulation around the statue. You circle the spiral, partnered in a dance.

The early Psyche sculpture also shows how hard such illusions are to master and maintain, now that the spectator has been propelled into motion and the fourth dimension (time) has entered into the equation. From one unfortunate viewing angle, the upside-down cherub suddenly looks like a lumpy bronze attachment, awkwardly stuck beneath the maiden’s raised thigh like bubble gum under a shoe. The delicate illusion shatters--and down crashes Psyche, putti and all.

In the more complicated examples of De Vries’ work--the buoyant, interlocking coils of “Mercury and Cupid” (1596-1599), say, or the serpentine entanglements of the half-dozen wrestling people and animals in “The Farnese Bull” (1614)--the dynamism of the intricate composition is further enhanced by the shifting play of light on patinated metal surfaces.

This manipulation of light would, in the final years of De Vries’ career, become one of the most startlingly original features of his work. “Hercules and the Apples” (1626-1627), just being completed at the artist’s death, exploits a free, painterly, almost impasto style of modeling for a rendition of the hero returning with three golden apples from the garden of Hesperides. Powerful but weary, dynamic yet agonized, Hercules--his face a blur--is shown as a man who’s been through a lot. In a manner that wouldn’t be seen again until Rodin, De Vries scattered the light to break up the muscular mass, tempering his evocation of triumphant struggle with an aura of ephemeral fragility.

De Vries’ subjects--the brotherly violence of Cain and Abel, the parable of Lazarus, the exploits of Hercules, Mercury and various nymphs--contain distinct moral messages based on biblical or, more often, antique literary sources. As his sculpture develops into a seductive, concrete appeal to virtue, his emergent Baroque sensibility begins down the road toward artistic evangelism.

Some messages are easy to read, such as the nymph in “An Allegory of Empire Triumphant Over Avarice” (1610), who holds a laurel wreath aloft while trampling another who spills coins on the ground. Yet most such messages are all but lost to our secular, post-classical world today. What’s crucial is that the artist’s appeal to virtue can nonetheless be plainly seen--if not in the obscure narratives, then certainly in the refinement and eloquence of the sculptural forms themselves.

For De Vries, art itself is virtue embodied. Skill, care, conviction, thoughtfulness, delight, surprise--even the occasional trickiness in his sculpture--puts meaning into the very activity of making art. With the late “impressionistic” works, where the labor of the artist’s hand is written all over the loosely modeled face of Hercules, whose own weary labors are the subject driving the form, art reads visually as virtue’s embodiment: In the brilliance of his sculptural achievement, De Vries returns from the struggle with golden apples of his own.

Jointly organized by curator Peter Fusco at the Getty, Frits Scholten at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum and Gorel Cavalli-Bjorkman at the National Museum in Stockholm (where many of De Vries’ sculptures ended up, courtesy of Sweden’s looting of Prague during the Thirty Years War), the exhibition has been only slightly trimmed from its two earlier European venues. Thirty-seven bronzes, ranging from tabletop statuettes and wall reliefs to larger-than-life monumental compositions, are the focus of the magnificent show.

It also features five pen-and-brush studies and one chalk drawing by the artist. For comparison and context, a variety of sculptures on similar themes by other artists (including Giambologna) are included, along with 11 engravings of De Vries’ work by his relative, Jan Muller. A fine catalog accompanies the show.

In the Getty’s north gallery, an excellent educational display takes you step by step through the difficult process of direct lost-wax casting, which De Vries masterfully employed. Unlike other forms of casting, this technique does not allow for the production of multiple bronzes. Every sculpture is singular.

Bronzes by Rodin are still being turned out from authorized plaster models, 82 years after the sculptor’s death. The absence of multiple copies of De Vries’ sculptures is another reason his reputation didn’t outlive him by much. But the engrossing Getty show brings him back convincingly--so convincingly he’s unlikely to be forgotten again.

* “Adriaen de Vries, Imperial Sculptor,” J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, through Jan. 9. Closed Mondays. Parking reservations: (310) 440-7300.