Art Review : The Met’s Rarity From the Renaissance : Exploratory Nature of Christus’ Work Offers an Illuminating Perspective

NEW YORK —  Because they’re so rare, exhibitions of Northern Renaissance painting rank as big-deal events. “Petrus Christus: Renaissance Master of Bruges” measures up.

Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, points out in the first paragraph of the chunky catalogue to the show, which is on view at the Manhattan museum through July, that there hasn’t been a significant display of Northern Renaissance art in the United States since a landmark presentation at the Detroit Institute of the Arts 34 years ago. That’s a long time between episodes.

The hiatus is not for lack of interest. Appropriate caution is the main reason for the rarity of such shows: 15th-Century Netherlandish artists typically painted on wooden panels and, especially after 500 years, panel paintings are exceptionally sensitive to changes in temperature and humidity. Bringing them together from far and wide can be risky.

Petrus Christus, whose known body of work amounts to fewer than 30 paintings, usually painted on panels made of oak. All but one little manuscript illumination (and four drawings) in the Met’s modest but absorbing show are painted on wood, 15 of the 17 panels identified as oak.

Those panels deemed too fragile to move--including the wonderful little “Lamentation” from the Louvre Museum and a small portrait of a young man from London’s National Gallery--have not traveled to New York. However much their presence is missed, caution is crucial to observe.

Fortunately, the Met already had a leg up on putting together a Christus survey--the first ever attempted. Five of his early paintings, including a fragmentary “Annunciation” (circa 1450) commonly attributed to the artist, are in the museum’s own collection. Curator Maryan W. Ainsworth had an in-house core on which to build.

A good part of the charm of Christus’ art can be located in the savvy sense of nimble curiosity these paintings represent. When he began to paint shortly after acquiring citizenship in the prosperous merchant city of Bruges in 1444 (his date of birth in the early 1400s isn’t known), all of Europe seemed to be in dramatic flux, economically, socially, politically and artistically. Looking at Christus’ paintings, you have the feeling of an artist puzzling things out.

Two examples stand out. One is the transition from manuscript illuminations, made in books for private devotion, to the more publicly conceived format of panel painting. It’s unusual to find a one-artist show that spans a dramatic ensemble chronicling “The Death of the Virgin” (circa 1460-65) and measuring 6 feet in height and more than 4 1/2 feet in width, and a tiny manuscript painting of the “Trinity” (circa 1470-75), just a few inches square.

Some of Christus’ panel paintings are also very small, such as the hauntingly strange “Madonna of the Dry Tree” (circa 1465), which is just under 6-by-5 inches. A crystalline Madonna and Child are portrayed standing in the crook of a dead tree, whose spiky branches encircle them in a clever reference to the crown of thorns. Tiny letter a’s suspended from the branches shimmer with a golden light against a deep brown-black background, creating a visual chorus of ave Marias from out of the darkness.

A latent, jewel-like preciousness born of manuscript illumination is one ingredient that makes Christus’ panel paintings so oddly compelling. Especially in his portraits, such as the uncannily intimate “Portrait of a Carthusian” (1446), the intensely observed pictures have the feel of devotional images.

The orchestration of linear patterns across the panel surface and the painted play of light across the planes of a face can together create a subtle tension between form conceived by the mind as an organizing idea and form regarded as something empirical, seen by the eye. Worshipful piety begins to become unmoored from eternal religious texts and transferred to the fleeting secular world.

Christus is one important link between earlier traditions of manuscript illumination and emergent conventions of panel painting, but there’s a second aspect to his art that commands attention. In an unusual way, this development is related to the more public nature of panel painting.

It’s startling to realize that, among other greatly revered Netherlandish painters, such as Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, Petrus Christus holds a unique position as the artist who painted the first Northern image with a fully realized one-point perspective. Already prominent in Italian art for a quarter century, the perspective method for precise rendering of objects in space arrived late in Northern Europe.

“Madonna Enthroned With Saints Jerome and Francis” (1457) was inexplicably cut down along its left side at some awful moment in its history; still, the coherence of the panel’s one-point perspective remains clear. At the Met, a display of infrared and X-ray pictures of the panel in a gallery adjacent to the show demonstrates how Christus worked out the one-point scheme. Through highly finished underdrawing, he painstakingly laid out the arrangement of figures in mathematically derived space.

What’s interesting about this use of perspective is not just that it’s the first example of a Northern artist fully grasping the new Southern convention of one-point perspective, which had developed in Florence. Italy’s mathematical device isn’t intrinsically more “true to life” than, say, the optically adjusted space that Van Eyck had so brilliantly mastered.

Instead, the arrival of one-point perspective to Northern Europe in 1457 says a lot about dynamic changes in international commerce and its relationship to art. Bruges was a commercial city of substantial significance; among its active patron class was a sizable and powerful group of Italian businessmen. (For example, the most important foreign branch of the Florentine Medici bank was in Bruges.) Ainsworth and catalogue essayist Maximilian P.J. Martens speculate--convincingly--that Christus’ urge to figure out the Italian system of one-point perspective came as an effort to satisfy demands of the marketplace. He wanted commissions from Italian collectors.

Conflicting techniques of empirical observation and formal method, the differing requirements of manuscript illumination and panel painting, the expansion of secular subject matter alongside religious imagery, the transformation of patronage--all of this and more is glimpsed in the handful of pictures left from Christus’ career. He was not an artist who worked in a comfortable niche and stuck with it. Instead, the complicated, shifting, exploratory nature of Christus’ art is the source of its compelling energy--especially for our present period of equally disorienting tumult.

* Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave., New York, (212) 535-7710, through July 31. Closed Mondays.