Manuscripts that illuminate their time

As the tumult of controversy over financial practices and antiquities purchases swirls around the Getty Center, the galleries of its museum offer a place of refuge. Think of them as the eye of the hurricane -- the still, calm space where the sun is shining and the sky is blue.

Two exhibitions that focus on medieval and Renaissance manuscripts opened this week, and both are absorbing, smartly conceived and beautifully executed. They include some of the greatest European painting of their time. Manuscript illumination is one of the chief strengths of the Getty Museum’s permanent collection, and shows like these build on that intensity.

One show is a reconstituted 1997 exhibition from New York’s Morgan Library, the nation’s premier repository for manuscripts, which has been closed for several years during a building renovation and expansion. (It will reopen in 2006.) The other is the fruit of a joint project between the Getty and London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, a collaboration that partly reconstructs the pages of a remarkable handmade prayer book that was taken apart and dispersed at the end of the 17th century.

“A Masterpiece Reconstructed: The Hours of Louis XII” brings together 15 of 16 known images from a book thought to have been made in 1498-99 by the court painter Jean Bourdichon, as a coronation present for the French king. (The missing 16th image is in the Wildenstein Collection at Paris’ Marmottan Museum, which unfortunately does not lend, while another 20 illuminations thought to have been included in the original book remain lost.) Usually, manuscript exhibitions can show only one or two paintings from the facing pages of an open book; by contrast, the reunion of these 15 detached pages offers an exceptional opportunity to explore almost half of the contents of Louis XII’s prayer book.

Framed and hanging on the walls of the museum’s manuscript gallery, the 15 paintings are installed in sequence around the room. Cases in the center feature contextual material, such as the Getty’s magnificent “Hours of Simon de Varie,” illuminated by the supremely gifted Frenchman Jean Fouquet about 40 years before Louis’ book.

Fouquet was Bourdichon’s teacher. His small book is opened to the delicate and moving frontispiece, which shows Simon de Varie kneeling in prayer at the right, while facing a devotional image of the Virgin and Child enthroned at the left. Bourdichon’s prayer book begins in a similar manner, with Louis surrounded by patron saints and on his knees wearing gilded armor -- dressed as a warrior for Christ. The devotional image that he faced is among those sheets that disappeared 300 years ago, when the book was taken apart.

If Bourdichon is not Fouquet’s equal as a painter of tender emotion, his work is nonetheless remarkable -- especially in the way light is used as an actor in the narrative. Among the book’s most remarkable images is “The Nativity,” in which a monumental figure of Mary, pushed close to the foreground to dominate the scene, is surrounded by Joseph, the child, an ox and a donkey, while shepherds peek into the stable through a window at the back.

Three light sources from three different sides illuminate Mary’s blue-robed figure. Behind her, Joseph’s lantern casts its luminosity upon her back. In front, the infant in the manger glows within radiant beams of gold, which shower the front of his mother’s body. From above, golden rays pour down into the nighttime chamber. Together the luminous Mary is molded from light cast by a trinity -- an earthly father, son and holy spirit -- a marvelously inventive gloss on a traditional theme.

Three of the Bourdichon miniatures were acquired by the Getty two years ago, including Louis at prayer and the presentation of the infant Jesus at the temple. The third painting, which is the subject of a separate essay in the fine catalog by the show’s organizer, Getty curator Thomas Kren, is the most surprising of all. It shows nude and luxurious Bathsheba bathing, while King David peers down on her from a castle window.

This amazing scene serves two functions. First, it introduces the biblical story, in which David’s adultery with Bathsheba and indirect murder of her husband become quintessential examples of the horrors of earthly sin and the struggle for eventual forgiveness. Although the Bible does not portray Bathsheba as a temptress, Bourdichon renders her as a cross between blond bombshell and flirtatious coquette.

As if the sensuous fullness of her form were not enough, her fecundity is announced in the visual center of the picture, where a tree in the garden is laden with ripe fruit. Flecks of gold paint render the flowing blond hair that frames Bathsheba’s body, and silver paint (now oxidized and blackened) creates the water’s surface shimmer around her voluptuous hips. Both use light’s reflective qualities to sanctify her form and draw the eye.

Louis’ eye, that is, since the book was made for him. The second function of the painting is to tempt the living king, much the way his biblical predecessor was tantalized. Bourdichon’s Bathsheba is not demurely glimpsed but put on bold display, like a profane Playboy centerfold inserted into a sacred prayer book. Success in the seduction is even intimated by the sly -- and rather randy -- insertion of a spurting fountain in front of the sumptuous lady. Its fountainhead is a lion, traditional symbol for King David and royal sign of Louis.

“A Masterpiece Reconstructed: The Hours of Louis XII” shows in eloquent detail how the imagery in a single manuscript could encompass a vast terrain of religious and secular thought. The second show, “Painted Prayers: Books of Hours From the Morgan Library,” uses about 60 manuscripts to examine the larger genre.

What is a book of hours? In essence, it’s a daily hedge against damnation.

Thirteenth and 14th century Europeans, like many Americans today, were obsessed with the afterlife -- with the promise of heaven as an everlasting release from the pain of human existence, and the miserable fear of hell as a concentrated eternity of something even lowlier than life’s worst horrors. For the faithful, a book of hours organized the calendar and offered a sequence of seven prayers -- at rising, 6 a.m., 9 a.m., noon, 3 p.m., early evening (vespers) and upon retiring -- that might ease the path to heaven and block the road to hell.

The Virgin Mary was the guide. God was busy, remote and fearsome. If you wanted to get Christ’s attention, there was no one better to ask to intercede on your behalf than Mom.

In the astounding crucifixion by the Master of Catherine of Cleves, which dates back to about 1440, the young duchess, urged by her patron saint, is shown uttering the words “Pray for me, Holy Mother of God,” in Latin script that unfurls on a scroll before her. Through a sequence of such scrolls Mary passes on that request to her son, nailed and bleeding on the cross between them, and he in turn looks up toward God, who bursts through the gold-leaf heavens, orb of the world in hand. “Your prayer has been heard with favor,” he replies, demonstrating the brisk effectiveness of Christian bureaucracy.

The cult of Mary that sprouted and grew in the late 13th century propelled the book of hours into bestseller status for the next 300 years. More of them were produced even than Bibles. The Morgan Library holds one of the world’s finest collections of them. Using numerous extraordinary examples, the show is clearly and concisely laid out in nine sections that explain the nine parts of a typical book.

It can be a bit daunting, if only because the show requires scrutiny of often relatively small pictures displayed inside glass cases. (Perhaps the smallest book, attributed to the Milanese painter Agostino Decio, is less than 3 inches tall. Most are considerably larger, but still small enough to be carried throughout the day.) But perseverance will bring great rewards.

Pay attention to the decorated borders that surround many of the painted leaves. Borders are a transitional space between the material world outside the book and the imaginative world depicted within the painting. In Simon Marmion’s impressive “Coronation of the Virgin,” which show’s Mary being installed as queen of heaven, the border is strewn with trompe-l’oeil flowers; they appear to cast shadows on the manuscript page, adding a decisive element of convincing naturalism to an otherwise mystical scene. Belief is enhanced.

The killer, though, is the border in the “Hours of Catherine of Cleves,” which is among the most famous books in the Morgan’s collection. A staggeringly complex interlace, painted in crimson, surrounds the crucifixion, interrupted by eight flawlessly executed geometric patterns in green, red, gold, white and black, which look like exotic tiles or game boards. Life is a knot and a puzzle, this dazzling border avers, but what this book contains will help unravel the mystery and put the pieces together.

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‘A Masterpiece Reconstructed: The Hours of Louis XII’ and ‘Painted Prayers: Books of Hours From the Morgan Library’

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

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays to Thursdays and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, closed Mondays

Ends: Jan. 8

Price: Free, parking $7

Contact: (310) 440-7360, www.getty.edu