Getty’s Window on the Renaissance

The last time I thought about stained glass was--well, I can’t remember the last time I thought about it. Stained glass is one of those sturdy supporting players in Western art history, a secondary medium that adds texture and nuance to the rhetoric of architectural design but that tends to get absorbed into bigger things--like Chartres Cathedral, for example, or the dreamy nostalgia of Art Nouveau.

That’s one reason a new exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum comes as such an unexpected pleasure. Another is the provocative connections the show explores between stained glass and two of the signal artists of the Renaissance. Who knew?

“Painting on Light: Drawings and Stained Glass in the Age of Durer and Holbein” is the quirkiest special exhibition the Getty has yet mounted. The show assembles more than 60 glass panels and 80 preparatory drawings for stained-glass windows, ranging in date from the 1470s to the 1520s. Most of the windows are of modest size, but eight are large. The most remarkable are a pair of powerful figures: Christ as the Man of Sorrows and Mary as the sorrowful Virgin, or Mater Dolorosa--after designs by Hans Baldung Grien (1480-1545); and a pair showing the Angel Gabriel arriving in the bed chamber of the Virgin Mary, after designs by Albrecht Durer (1471-1528).

Indeed, Durer is the star of this show. The 15 drawings by (or attributed to) him are reason enough to climb the Getty hill. Discovering that Durer was, in many respects, the source of an efflorescence in stained-glass window design in southern Germany and parts of Switzerland is surprising only insofar as stained glass is relatively unexplored territory. Durer’s own artistic brilliance was famously far-reaching, thanks to his amazing work in the multipliable medium of wood engraving.

Yet, a peculiar paradox marks Durer’s role in the elevation of stained-glass art. Think “stained glass” and you think color--cobalt blue and crimson and golden yellow, always shifting and changing with the passing light of day. Think “Durer,” though, and you think of line--powerful, rhythmic, expressive line. It just might be that the inevitable fusion of color with line in any stained-glass window designed by him is what made Durer’s contribution so decisive.

Line was everything for Durer. A series of trips he made from Nuremberg to Italy progressively deepened his commitment to the linearity of Italian Renaissance painting--especially the example of Leonardo da Vinci. The graphic power of line lay in its deliberateness, in its sense of artistic decision-making made visible. Line is emblematic of thought, partly because of its association with writing. For art, an emphasis on linearity put forth the radically new idea of the artist as not just a manual craftsman, skilled with his hands in executing programs determined by churchmen or learned aristocrats, but as an independent creative thinker as well.

When Durer returned to Nuremberg from his first Italian sojourn in 1495, a skilled artisan named Veit Hirsvogel the Elder had just been appointed the city’s official glass painter. Painted glass was being used in town halls, churches, private chapels, residences and other buildings. Durer helped to fill the growing demand, while the magnificence of his work also likely helped to fuel it.

Durer’s 1504 design for the Annunciation window, made in Hirsvogel’s workshop for the choir of an important private chapel, is a tour de force of stained glass. The demure Virgin, cloaked in sumptuous brocades and crowned with rhythmic trails of hair, receives the news from Gabriel that she will be the mother of God. The angel is rendered with a monumental sculptural volume that gives his mission a literal sense of weightiness. Color, ranging from lush reds and purples to an array of greens and golds, both celebrates and consecrates the stunning announcement.

The exhibition is divided into two main sections, which correspond to the layout of the Getty’s special exhibition hall. Each loosely identifies a generation.

First comes Durer. Drawings and glass panels show his precursors--especially a gifted anonymous artist called the Master of the Housebook--as well as the hugely influential work Durer produced in Nuremberg and his legacy in southern Germany.

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The second generation is dominated by Hans Holbein the Younger, who wasn’t born until 1496 or 1497, after Durer began his fateful sojourns to Italy, and who served his apprenticeship in Basel, Switzerland. These galleries focus on the highly refined glass panels made in the cosmopolitan center of Augsburg, where Holbein’s father was a successful painter, and then on the impact the younger artist had in Switzerland before he decamped for London and the court of Henry VIII.

In addition to the exceptional drawings by Durer, such as a complex window design with an energetic Saint George slaying a gruesome dragon, or a simple yet powerful figure of death on horseback, the show includes several gems. There’s an almost Expressionist drawing of Christ carrying the cross by Albrecht Altdorfer (from the Getty’s own collection and Altdorfer’s only known design for stained glass) and Holbein’s magnificent crucifixion, a dynamic tableau of remarkable conceptual complexity and clarity. (Two glass panels based on the Holbein crucifixion drawing are installed nearby.)

Among the more compelling glass panels is a suite of 12 roundels from Augsburg depicting the story of Joseph and the tribes of Israel. Ringed in cobalt blue and rendered in tones of gold, white and black, they convey the acute refinement possible with the medium.

Between the exhibition’s two sections, the museum has installed a helpful display on the Renaissance process of making stained glass. It sorts out the difficult, collaborative effort step by step.

One thing you don’t quite get from the show is a clear sense of how these stained-glass panels worked in the particular architectural programs for which they were designed. Much fragile glass has been lost over the centuries, and the examples here now reside in European and American art museums (or, in the case of a large Hirsvogel window, after a design by Durer, at Glendale’s Forest Lawn cemetery). They have been handsomely installed in light boxes, with period sketches of townscapes behind them, which does convey the sense of light, airiness and dimensionality that makes paintings on glass different from paintings on wood or canvas. But how they operate architecturally remains obscure.

This is a minor quibble, though. Deftly organized by Getty curator Lee Hendrix and by Barbara Butts, guest curator at the Saint Louis Art Museum, where the show travels next, “Painting on Light” is a thoroughly captivating presentation on an unusual and neglected subject.

* J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, (310) 440-7300, through Sept. 24. Closed Mondays.