A GASTRONOMIC AFFAIR SATIATE YOUR APPETITE WITH AN 'EDIBLE MONUMENT'.

Byline: Reed Johnson Staff Writer

This spring, the Getty Center in Brentwood is having its art and eating it, too. Or at least giving it a long, hungry look.

``The Edible Monument: The Art of Food for Festivals,'' an exhibition on view at the Getty Research Institute through May 21, is giving curious visitors a taste of an esoteric and necessarily ephemeral art form: decorations and monumental sculptures made of food.

Outlandish and enticing in equal measure, these culinary marvels were mostly used for aristocratic banquets and street festivals in Europe between the 16th and 19th centuries.

From relatively simple sugar-paste miniature buildings to multistory baroque edifices composed of fruits, pastries, cheeses and roasted pigs, these monuments testified to their patrons' good taste, wealth and social standing, with awe-inspiring displays of conspicuous consumption that would be right at home at an Oscar-night party on the Sunset Strip.

``It's not just in the 20th century that we love beautiful food and love to eat,'' says Getty chief librarian Susan Allen. ``If you think about things like Mardi Gras, even Super Bowl Sunday or Chinese New Year's, you get the idea.''

Drawn from the Research Institute's formidable collections of rare cookbooks, serving manuals and deluxe festival books, ``Edible Monument'' contains 70 mind-boggling, mouth-watering depictions of concoctions that were gobbled up or carted away centuries ago.

Other drawings illustrate the unbelievably hierarchical guest-seating orders at spectacular dinner parties, where the placement of each napkin and dish was as carefully regimented as a military campaign. (Eat your heart out, Martha Stewart.)

Also on display is ``Palace of Circe, Dessert Table after Menon'' a full-scale replica of an 18th-century sugar sculpture of a classical Greek temple, complete with balustrades and sugar sand parterres.

On loan from Fairfax House in York, England, the work is an edible cautionary tale, depicting Homer's account in ``The Odyssey'' of how Ulysses' men were turned into pigs by the sorceress Circe. It was re-created in 1997 by British botanist/culinary historian Ivan Day, and flown over from England in its very own seat on a Virgin Atlantic jet. It was then reassembled by Getty staffers using egg whites to hold it together.

While many of the works shown in the exhibition were originally seen only by epicurean elites, the large-scale immovable feasts served a more public purpose.

In cities like Bologna, Italy, nobles and royalty used massive free-for-all food grabs to convey the goodness and prosperity of the governing city-state and to reinforce their own rule - a version of the Ancient Romans' mob-quelling formula of ``bread and circuses.''

At a given signal from the ruler, the plebes would rush up to these towering structures and rip off hunks of bread and cheese, dip their jugs in specially built wine fountains, even snatch up live animals that were left to roam free on these football field-sized enclosures.

For frenzied group gluttony, it was a spectacle hard to surpass even at a Taco Bell drive-in window on a Saturday night - an early multimedia event that served a complicated social and political agenda.

If you seek more food for thought, Peter Brown of Fairfax House will give a related lecture, ``Eat, Drink and Be Merry,'' at 4 p.m. May 18 in the Research Institute's Lecture Hall.

Bon appetit!

THE FACTS

--What: ``The Edible Monument: The Art of Food for Festivals.''

--Where: Getty Research Institute Exhibitions Gallery, the Getty Center, Brentwood.

--When: Getty Center hours are 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; through May 21.

--Admission: Admission to the Getty is free. Parking is $5 per car; parking reservations are required and available now, including same-day reservations. Reservations are not required for college students with current ID or for visitors arriving by taxi, shuttle, motorcycle, bicycle or public bus. Call [phone].

CAPTION(S):

3 photos, box

Photo:

(1) ``The Edible Monument: The Art of Food for Festivals'' features epicurean art, including ``Disegni del Convito'' by Italian artist Ratta, on view through May 21.

(2) On loan from the Fairfax House in York, England, ``Palace of Circe'' is an intricate sculpture made of sugar by Ivan Day.

(3) ``Centerpiece, Sculpture of La Felsina'' is shown in an etching.

Box: THE FACTS (see text)