Getty makes two prime purchases

In an ongoing quest to bolster its art collections, the J. Paul Getty Museum has strengthened its holdings of European sculpture and illuminated manuscripts with two major acquisitions.

“The Vexed Man,” an 18th century alabaster bust by Austrian artist Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, will go on view at the museum later this spring. “Vita Christi,” an English Romanesque illumination, will debut in “Imagining Christ,” an exhibition opening May 6.

The Messerschmidt sculpture is one of 69 highly expressionistic “Character Heads” produced during the last 13 years of the artist’s life, from 1770 to 1783. Carved in alabaster or, more often, cast in metal, the heads are the work of a troubled artist who was an exemplar of the Viennese Enlightenment but was dismissed from the Akademie in Vienna because of mental instability.

The “Character Heads” were a personal project that epitomized Messerschmidt’s obsessions with human expressions and physical manifestations of disease and deformity. He never exhibited the heads, but 49 of them were introduced to the public in 1793, and the series has come to be known as an important artistic achievement of the period. At the Getty, “The Vexed Man” will join a small collection of rare 18th century Central European sculptures.

“Vita Christi,” said to be the finest example of English Romanesque illumination in a private collection before the Getty bought it, is a two-part compilation of illuminations from the 12th and 15th centuries.

The 12th century section contains 51 full-page miniatures probably created as a pictorial preface to a psalter, which likely included the Old Testament Book of Psalms and other devotional material. The images, painted in northern England, depict the life of Christ in intimate detail.

The second portion consists of 57 miniatures, integrated into the earlier cycle in the 15th century. This segment spans the history of the world as told in the Bible, from the fall of rebel angels to the apocalypse.

The manuscript complements another recent Getty acquisition, an English illumination known as the “Northumberland Bestiary” and created around 1250 to 1260.

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suzanne.muchnic@latimes.com