‘Hours’ of Light Reading

An exhibition of Italian illuminated manuscripts at the Getty Center finds its focus in a book as tiny as it is sumptuous. Slightly larger than a deck of playing cards, “The Gualenghi-d’Este Hours” is billed as the greatest thing of its kind in the museum. Illustrated around 1469 by Taddeo Crivelli and Guglielmo Giraldi, it celebrates an aristocratic marriage in the principality of Ferrara.

Significantly, the alliance was, in effect, a reward from the court of Ferrara to one of its advisors. Andrea Gualengo did such a good job of solving a sticky dispute with neighboring Faenza that his boss, Borso d’Este, gave him the hand of a family member, Orsina d’Este. The fact that both parties had children by previous marriages suggests an essentially political arrangement.

At the same time, nobody would have found any hypocrisy in commemorating the event in a book about prayer and devotion. A darkened gallery protects all the public is allowed to see of the precious object--a single pair of delicate original pages, text and illumination--enshrined in a glass case like the jewel it is. You get a peek at Crivelli’s “St. Gregory.” All 27 illustrations are represented by transparency reproductions that are displayed along with related volumes, medals, painting and sculpture.

All this creates an ambience of sacrosanct distance that might cause shy viewers to feel this fare is too esoteric. That idea would surely horrify Getty curator Kurt Barstow. He labored five years to realize the exhibition and its accompanying monograph, subtitled “Art and Devotion in Renaissance Ferrara.”

His idea was to bring the light of culture to the art of illumination. His text provides a wealth of comparative data. If it sometimes gets lost in imitating the Medieval love of exquisite detail, it never stops looking for the bigger picture.

Historical hindsight lets us get an overview more readily than the book’s creators. By the time their volume was made, Gutenberg’s mechanical type was already in use. The days of the handmade book were numbered, and with them the biblical cosmology it fostered and its style--International Gothic. This lush ambiguity of space in Medieval art was dominated by equally conceptual beliefs. But Giotto’s 14th century images of real space and material substance had already forced Gothic artists into a struggle to resolve the two styles.

“The Gualenghi-d’Este Hours” show a highly sophisticated world assailed by anxious nostalgia for a faith grown evermore secularized. Giraldi only contributed four full images to the text. Clearly more traditional than Crivelli, his work is handsome and stable but inwardly uneasy. His “All Saints” has a floral border that floats with childlike rapture, innocent of a distinction between imagination and reality. The saints--confined in a rectangle--wear traditional symbolic colors against a gold that is at once light and substance. Their mournful expressions seem newly aware of the literal gravity and weight of their bodies.

If Giraldi’s art is haunted, Crivelli’s is downright spooked. Even more peculiar--it isn’t Giraldi’s moderation that’s typical of Ferrara, it’s Crivelli’s disturbed proto-Surreal Expressionism.

His “St. Jerome Adoring the Crucifix” depicts the penitential holy man in a desolate, clearly imaginary landscape. Emerged from a cave-like niche in a phantasmagoric hillock, he kneels, embracing the cross and washing the feet of Christ with his tears. The Christian savior smiles through his corpse-like pallor. The scene is framed in yet another unreal plane where a hunting dog snaps at the feet of a hare.

Barstow’s text suggests that the two images parallel each other, symbolizing the pursuit of a desired object. Crivelli’s eccentricity is almost exhibitionistic; he was either an authentically disturbed soul or consciously used every opportunity of distortion, exaggeration or juxtaposition to infect the view with dread.

What makes the whole thing even stranger is the existence of a regular school of such Ferrarese artists. Chronologically their careers span the century from the birth of Cosme Tura in 1430 through Francesco del Cossa and Ercole de Roberti to the death of Dosso Dossi in 1542.

Why would the local establishment support such a markedly perverse Mannerist style? Ferrara is located in the fertile but characterless flatlands of the Po Valley. The town itself is comparatively colorless. Lacking the power and panache of Rome, Florence or Venice, the ruling D’Este dynasty was obliged to maintain itself by fostering stability through political compromise of the kind that created “The Gualenghi-d’Este Hours.”

Thus, it was culture rather than politics that provided its leaders with prestige. Ferrara’s best-remembered architectural landmark is the D’Este’s pleasure palace, the Palazzo de Schifanoia. The home-grown poet Ariosto is ranked with Dante and Shakespeare for his “Orlando Furioso.” Visiting artists included Pisanello, Leonbattista Alberti, Piero della Francesca, Mantegna and Rogier van der Weyden. Every one left a noticeable influence on Ferrarese art, especially Rogier, who supplied the spice of a certain North European ugliness.

The evidence adds up to a strong suggestion that Ferrara was rather touchingly willing to tolerate being thought weird in exchange for being thought of at all.

* The J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive. Through July 30. Free but parking reservations, $5, required. (310) 440-7300. Closed Mondays.