A courtly grace

Since the opening of the Getty Center in 1997, many have been disappointed with the faltering pace and erratic commitment of the museum’s acquisitions for its permanent collection. One great work of art after another has landed in public and private collections elsewhere.

On the other, happier side of the museum ledger, there’s been a welcome surprise. Temporary exhibitions, which didn’t have much of a place in the Getty’s old Malibu venue, have racked up an almost unbroken record as exceptional, rewarding events. Last week, the Getty opened its latest.

“Illuminating the Renaissance: The Triumph of Flemish Manuscript Painting in Europe” is easily the most impressive manuscript show I’ve seen in 30 years of regular museum going. (Part of the reason: Major manuscript shows are rare as hens’ teeth.) Manuscript painting from the region of modern-day Belgium and northern France constitutes one unmistakable strength of the Getty’s collection, and asserting the Flemish art’s triumph 500 years ago does not overstate the case. The material is fresh and challenging, the catalog breaks scholarly ground, and the presentation is accessible and provocative.

Simon Marmion, Gerard David and Simon Bening are not nearly as famous today as artists of the Italian Renaissance are. Northern European manuscript illumination in the years between 1470 and 1560 was a courtly art, often intended for private devotion, while painting in the south emerged as a powerful form of public display. But Marmion, David and Bening are among the stars of this show, and it’s easy to see why. In small paintings tucked away in books, they made improbable miracles seem the most natural things in the world.

Take Bening’s “The Denial of St. Peter,” found in a prayer book made for a cardinal in Brandenburg, Germany. The book is a meditation on Christ’s suffering and death, and many compositions among its 41 miniatures follow established patterns of the period. Yet Bening altered them to create intense dramatic narratives; their impact far exceeds their modest size.

An open fireplace lights the nocturnal interior in the biblical story of St. Peter’s crisis of faith, in which he thrice denied the divinity of Jesus. Seven figures and a dog, a symbol of fidelity, are arrayed around it. The fire is a source of light, physical and spiritual, as well as a crackling central metaphor for emotional passion. That fervor is displayed in animated facial features and hand gestures -- not to mention brilliant stylistic fireworks.

For example, the foreground soldier is rendered in dark silhouette; next to him, but on the other side of the fire, a handmaiden is the most brightly lighted figure in the room. The stark juxtaposition of dark and light establishes a dynamic range of dramatic feeling.

Peter’s ambivalence is suggested by the raking half-light that illuminates him at the side. He flings his arms wide. From there a procession of bodies and hands marches across the scene, which reads like a printed page -- from left to right.

Along the journey your eye passes across a distant open door, where the tiny figure of Jesus is glimpsed at the moment of his sentencing, when his fate is sealed. It ends in the upper right at the open beak of a squawking rooster, perched on a balcony. In a tiny space -- the painting is less than 7 by 5 inches -- Bening has registered with awesome skill the climactic moment of a disciple’s denial of faith, before the cock crows.

The popular imagination associates manuscript painting with the Middle Ages, when the first great flowering of devotional books occurred. The invention of movable type in the mid-1400s, with its promise of eventual mass production, sealed the fate of costly, labor-intensive, one-of-a-kind books.

But the compelling Getty exhibition forges ahead into the Renaissance, showing that the form’s demise wasn’t quick. (Bening’s Brandenburg prayer book was painted around the time Michelangelo was busy carving his marble sculptures of captives in Florence, Italy.) A manuscript’s well-established status as a rare genre of luxury object was suddenly magnified, not diminished, by the arrival of Johann Gutenberg’s printing press. The great age of illumination is shown to have ended with a bang, not a whimper.

Surprisingly, the proof of this power is in the margins. The decorated borders of the manuscript page tell an astounding story. As with all great Renaissance art, an emphasis on naturalism had arisen in manuscript painting by the end of the 15th century. Subtle lighting, psychological probity, optical atmosphere, palpable textures, illusionist space and other visually persuasive effects became the norm.

The show proposes that their source was in the interaction between manuscript illuminators and panel painters, such as Rogier van der Weyden and David, who worked in the newer medium of luminous oil paint on prepared wooden surfaces. And it was in the decorated borders of the manuscript page that those dazzling experiments in naturalistic effects became the rage.

In fact, an elaborately decorated frame around the text or painted miniature is a hallmark of Flemish manuscript art. Simple visual pleasure is certainly reason enough for the delicate border depictions of flowers, bugs, snails, birds and other carefully rendered elements of the natural world. Entwined with elegant interlaces, they’re often set off by a light-reflective gold background, on which playful shadows appear to be cast.

But these naturalistic borders also serve a conceptually profound function. Unlike the main illustrations on the page, which can show anything from full-length portraits of saints to epic narratives meant to convey the authority of history, the borders depict objects at the same size and scale as real life.

A cast of thousands might be portrayed in miniature, but in the book’s border the depiction is similar to, say, a real dragonfly on an actual flower. This doppelganger isn’t just a visual tour de force, rendered for its own amusing sake; instead, it subtly alters your state of mind as you look at the pictures and read the text.

The naturalistic border framing a miniature or text helps convince the viewer that what is seen in the picture or read in the calligraphy is likewise demonstrably true. Men arising from the dead, people with wings, devil-dragons being slain, bearded men and veiled women floating in the sky inside glowing orbs -- if the frame of reference is so easily to be believed, then the otherwise implausible or incredible scene depicted within the miniature is too. Christian stories and political histories of dynastic unions and aristocratic genealogies are naturalized, with exquisite grace and facility.

For “Illuminating the Renaissance,” nearly 90 books have been brought together from dozens of American and European collections by Thomas Kren, Getty curator of manuscripts, and Scot McKendrick, manuscript curator at the British Library. (In November, the show will travel to London’s Royal Academy, its only other stop.) Numerous single sheets, several oil paintings on wooden panels, a variety of portrait miniatures and some drawings amplify these often lavishly decorated books.

The show can be demanding, if only because the modest size of most illuminations requires a patient focus -- one that’s different from the experience of easel painting. And looking at small paintings inside display cases, necessary for their protection, is sometimes arduous.

Several books are also shown in cases low to the floor, which is great for kids but not so great for adults. But with the effort comes exceptional rewards. “Illuminating the Renaissance” will make you reconsider the place of decorated books within the history of European art. That’s no small feat.

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‘Illuminating the Renaissance’

What: “Illuminating the Renaissance: The Triumph of Flemish Manuscript Painting in Europe”

Where: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood

When: Tuesday-Thursday and Sunday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Friday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-9 p.m.; closed Monday

Ends: Sept. 7

Price: Free; parking, $5 (reservations required on weekdays)

Contact: (310) 440-7300