Humility at its most radiant

VINCENT VAN GOGH is the marquee name for the fall art museum season now in full swing here. Surprisingly, the large survey of his drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art marks the first time his work in charcoal, watercolor and pen and ink has been brought together in such abundance. Unsurprisingly, the galleries are filled with eager visitors.

However engaging these drawings certainly are, the real artistic excitement in New York’s museums this fall will be found elsewhere. Two exhibitions of Renaissance painting are, like the Van Gogh drawing show, virtually unprecedented. And neither is likely to be repeated anytime soon.

Fra Angelico, the early 15th century Florentine friar and religious painter, and Hans Memling, the late 15th century Germanic artist who lived in the Flemish coastal city of Brugge, both made art before canvas became the standard painting support used by Europeans. They painted instead on wooden panels. Famously susceptible to changes in humidity and temperature, panel paintings pose conservation problems that often prevent them from being loaned.

At the Met, “Fra Angelico,” which continues through Jan. 29, includes 67 panels by the master. At the Frick Collection, “Memling’s Portraits” (through Dec. 31) brings together 20, including nearly two-thirds of the known portraits made by the artist. Both shows feature important loans from major collections in Europe and the United States, and both are extraordinary. Together they put a rare focus on fascinating aspects of the Renaissance in southern and northern Europe.

They also lead one to marvel at the vicissitudes of life, both man-made and natural. Advances in technology have made loans of panel paintings more feasible. (At the Frick, one Memling portrait of a woman is enclosed in its own individually climate-controlled frame, like the girl in a bubble.) But during the 500 years since they were made, many of these paintings were subjected to remarkable brutalities.

Altarpieces were dismantled and many individual panels sawed into pieces. Some pictures were cleaned with abrasive chemicals that stripped parts of their top layer of paint. Pigments oxidized over time. The fact that these works remain powerful and compelling in spite of all that is one clear sign of these artists’ greatness.

Fra Angelico -- the angelic friar, so eulogized after his 1455 death by a fellow Dominican brother -- has long been regarded as an utterly charming, somewhat provincial purveyor of deeply pious Christian imagery. This show sends that slightly condescending interpretation into the trash bin.

Provincial, ha!

The friar’s enduring reputation rests on the large, complex series of frescoes commissioned for the church and cloister of San Marco in 1438 by Cosimo de’ Medici, de facto ruler of Florence. Angelico spent four years on the project, painting some murals himself and directing the work of numerous assistants. In the most potent paintings, he managed a seemingly irreconcilable feat: Angelico endowed humility with a sense of monumental grandeur. Holding this contradiction in equilibrium was his great contribution to Renaissance humanism.

The Dominican order was rigorous in abiding by strict vows of poverty, and Angelico’s commissions, earned as a successful artist, helped keep the convent going. Meanwhile, the paintings were a means with which to spread Dominican doctrine.

Modest, self-effacing, unpretentious -- Fra Angelico endowed these humble attributes with a measure of gorgeous gravity that made humility seem the most important, beautiful and desirable condition in life.

He did it largely with color. Angelico’s panels are painted with tempera, in which ground and powdered pigments are mixed with egg yolk to form a paste that dries into a bright, durable surface. (Have you ever tried to scrape dried egg yolk off a breakfast plate?) The tempera, sometimes diluted with water, was laid on in thin layers. Building up veils of color created deep, rich, jewel-like tones of brilliant hue.

Angelico’s sophisticated handling of color is mesmerizing. In a panel that shows St. Catherine and John the Baptist, he sets opposites on the color wheel side by side to create visual drama and optical depth. The red cloak over Catherine’s blue robe is veiled in a distinctly orange hue, while the soft pink of John’s cloak contrasts with the gentle greenish tint given to his animal-skin garment. These carefully wrought juxtapositions cause the colors to pop; optic volumes of space and mass open up.

A modern reevaluation

ONE reason Angelico has long been portrayed as sweet but old-fashioned is the vesting of greater faith in the radical achievements of his only Florentine rival, the slightly younger Masaccio. (Angelico was born between 1395 and 1400, Masaccio in 1401.) Masaccio, though he died unspeakably young in 1428, had donned seven-league boots to overstep entrenched timidity and tradition. He advanced the sculpture of classical antiquity as the basis for volumetric form in painting. He developed one-point perspective as the mathematical engine for creating a perception of space. And chiaroscuro -- the illusion of light emerging from darkness -- was the bridge he erected to link form with space.

Angelico recognized the younger upstart’s brilliance and learned from him. He began to organize space mathematically, and his paintings of the Madonna assumed a massive plasticity straight from antique models.

And yet because he was first trained as a small-scale manuscript illuminator -- Angelico’s brother, also a Dominican friar, was a scribe -- he had an acute sense of how to blend naturalistic detail with decorative patterning. Not only was this different from anything found in Masaccio, patterned color was also traditionally associated with the older Gothic art of Siena, Florence’s fading civic competitor. Angelico got tagged as magnificently gifted in a somewhat retrograde way.

How wrong that perception is. “Fra Angelico,” deftly organized by curator Laurence B. Kantor, is an important exhibition because it renders that former view finally obsolete.

Think of it this way: If Masaccio was the boisterous Picasso of the early Italian Renaissance, reinventing the scaffolding of modern picture-making, then Fra Angelico was the era’s Matisse. His color is powerful, complex and revolutionary. In the spiritual context of religious art, he made the irrational, exotic associations of color seem ineffable and exalting.

Like Matisse, whose star has been on the rise relative to Picasso’s in recent decades, Fra Angelico is every bit Masaccio’s equal: He’s a radical inventor of profoundly humanist values. The two artists simply achieved it in different ways.

The show has a number of terrific touches. A small, rather awkward panel of “The Virgin and Child Enthroned With Saints” (circa 1411) from the San Diego Museum of Art is traditionally attributed to Angelico’s teacher, Lorenzo Monaco. But here it is convincingly proposed to be among the first works painted by the teenage Guido di Pietro, who became Fra Giovanni and then Angelico.

Ten panels from a single altarpiece have been brought together from several American and European collections to give a sense of the complex interplay among parts in Angelico’s ambitious altars. (Look to the hypnotic rainbows in the angel Gabriel’s wings for a lesson in the painter’s skill at layering veils of color.) Elsewhere, a pair of panels from the J. Paul Getty Museum showing four saints has been surmounted by panels of the Virgin and the annunciating angel from the Yale University Art Gallery; they were sawed apart sometime in the 19th century and are reunited here. And a nice selection of panels by contemporaries, including the gifted Benozzo Gozzoli, offers illuminating context.

The knockout work by Angelico is a startling, slightly larger than life-size bust of “Christ Crowned With Thorns.” Red has no fewer than five different uses in this one harrowing image of the man of sorrows.

Color as the carrier of monumental humility is deployed with genius in this astounding panel. Sharp barbs from the crown of thorns pierce Jesus’ brow and spatter his face with blood. The whites of his eyes are glazed with the same scary hue, and they glow like embers. The crimson color that turns his robe into a ruby-trimmed royal raiment also makes his halo into a blazing starburst. Finally, the color describes his gently parted lips, framing a dark void from which the last breath of life fuses with a suggestion of the utterance of the Word.

Pioneering works in oil

THIS work reinterprets a northern European type popularized by Jan van Eyck -- Christ in majesty -- which brings us to Hans Memling (circa 1435-1494). This show, organized by the Groeninge Museum in Brugge, Belgium, is having its only American stop at the Frick.

Like most late 15th century northerners, Memling stood in the shadow of Van Eyck, the earlier painter, but the interaction between European artists in the north and south is one of the fascinations of the early Renaissance. Brugge was a center of trade, and Florentine bankers had major outposts there. Paintings (and some painters) went back and forth. Memling was the first northern artist to paint landscapes as the setting for his portraits, a type that may have come from Piero della Francesca in Tuscany and was later cemented as an Italian standard in Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa.”

Memling’s portraits line two small basement rooms at the Frick. In most, the landscape’s horizon subtly severs the portrait’s head from its body.

The head is inevitably surrounded by ethereal sky -- nature’s resplendent halo -- while the body is embedded with the earthy fields and forests. The juxtaposition of an always idyllic, far-distant landscape with a half-length, slightly turned sitter pushed up against the foreground plane makes each figure seem monumental. He (and occasionally she) towers over the paradise of creation.

The Renaissance revolution in the north turned on a hinge both simple and profound: oil. Suspending ground pigments in a viscous substance like oil creates an entirely different visual effect than is possible by using egg yolk, water, milk or another liquid. Oil traps light, bouncing it around inside rather than just reflecting it.

Memling, like Angelico, laid down his colors in thin layers. But unlike many of his northern compatriots, he kept the number of layers to a minimum. (Sometimes you can even see the under-drawing through the film of paint.) His figures don’t glow, they are not radiant, and luminous isn’t the right word either. Instead, his color casts an even light across the entire pictorial surface, while his forms have an odd transparency.

The faces are uniformly expressionless. Add to this the artist’s acute attention to naturalistic detail -- to rendering every whisker in a man’s five o’clock shadow, the scuffed velvet of a purple tunic or the subtle transparencies of a sheer folded veil.

In the most astonishing example, the 1487 “Diptych of Maarten van Nieuwenhove,” the reflection of the back of the Madonna and Child seen in the left panel and the attending donor seen in the right panel turns up in a circular mirror hanging on a rear wall. Wow!

The result of all that is an aura of permanent, ordered serenity -- of stability and calm. And it never wavers.

In the last half of Memling’s life, social and political turmoil swirled around him -- the empire changed hands, plague swept through the city -- and his wife died, leaving three children. But you’d never know it from looking at his portraits. There, all is as it always was -- and always will be.

Which is pretty much their point.

The wealthy burghers, young and old, are portrayed as if colored statues, like Photorealist paintings of Duane Hanson sculptures. As in the great “Diptych of Maarten van Nieuwenhove,” in which Maarten gazes for eternity upon the Virgin and Child in the adjacent panel, many of these portraits are devotional images. Sitters are shown in a pose of veneration, hands clasped in prayer. Their eyes focus on a vision of paradise whose earthly reflection unfolds in the tranquil landscape behind them.

Memling endows these people with a blissed-out aura of eternal peace. When the plague is a visitor that periodically comes to town, that’s not a bad hope to hold close.