A Northern Renaissance at the Metropolitan.

In this era of blockbuster shows, the permanent collections of the Metropolitan frequently become what we walk past on the way out of the latest event, so it's good to be reminded of how remarkable those collections are. Happily, the Met periodically organizes scholarly exhibitions that spotlight the richness and depth of the museum's own holdings. The current in-house showcase, "From Van Eyck to Bruegel: Early Netherlandish Painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art" may be the most spectacular and thoughtful to date. For cognoscenti and novices alike, for lovers of Netherlandish painting, and even for the undecided, the show is an unalloyed delight, a celebration of the abilities of early northern artists and an education in the field's latest scholarship (including the most recent attributions).(1) If the exhibition were anywhere else, New York art lovers would be planning trips so as not to miss it.

It's a show that takes effort, full of contemplative, often devotional works made slowly with meticulous attention to nuance and detail, and meant to be studied over a long period of time. They are pictures that dwell equally on the particulars of observable reality and the intangibles of faith. (Whether any of this can be seen -- literally or metaphorically -- in a crowded gallery is another story.) There's none of the stabilizing geometry of Italian Renaissance painting in Flemish art of the same period, none of the measured harmony that implies an ideal Platonic order underlying the randomness of ordinary experience. Instead, we are presented with an empirical, curiosity-driven record of the world with all its irregularities, its myriad textures and colors, its infinite distances, and its nonstop eventfulness. Backgrounds unroll in endless layers of townscape, field, forest, and river, all teeming with activity. Something is always happening, somewhere.

Yet the result of this interrogation of life as we know it is somehow more than real, as if we were seeing the quotidian world through eyes with more than human ability. Colors are more jewel-like, more saturated than they appear in reality; patterns are crisper; leaves and strands of hair more distinct; tiny details are more evident. Everything, no matter how apparently insignificant, is revealed with the same preternatural intensity and clarity, freezing the variety and action of daily life into magical stillness.

The tangible surface of paint disappears into seamless enamelled glazes that mimic fabric and fur. The artist's hand itself seems to disappear and we are left with a powerful metaphor for the omniscient, all-penetrating gaze of a deity. (It has been suggested that these works were made with the aid of magnifying lenses and were meant to be seen through lenses.) Yet, at the same time, with northern empirical observation taking the place of Italian mathematical linear perspective, these paintings remain firmly grounded in the realm of human endeavor. No wonder these painters were among the most admired and sought after of their day.

A great deal has been written about the concealed symbolism of the apparently naturalistic details of early Netherlandish paintings. Nothing is what it seems. A lily in a vase, especially in an Annunciation or an Adoration of the Magi, is never merely a bit of still life, but an allusion to the virginity of Mary. So is a glass-paned window or a walled courtyard garden. A swooning Virgin whose pose echoes that of her dead son in a Deposition is not simply a compositional device, but a graphic emblem of (literally) compassion. And so on. When I was a student, we spent a lot of time on this sort of thing; I remember a medieval Latin jingle comparing the Immaculate Conception to light passing through a window pane -- something about "Virgo post et ante" The point was to underline the difference between Italian and northern sensibilities. For a Florentine to paint a landscape full of shepherds and travelers was a manifestation of his delight in what he saw; for a painter from Bruges, it was an allusion to something otherworldly and spiritual.

These days, no one underestimates the palpable spirituality of these pictures, but scholars place equal emphasis on their worldliness. That Flemish painters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries set their religious dramas in recognizably contemporary, realistic settings is ample proof that they took just as much pleasure in observing and depicting the world around them as their Italian counterparts did, whatever meaning they attached to what they rendered. The Flemings may not have been thinking about the latest poem by Poliziano, but they, too, as members in good standing of the Renaissance, were active participants in exploring the here and now -- as well as in imagining the heavenly and the hellish. (In general, our notion of the whole fascinating, intricate relationship between the arts of Northern Europe and Italy in the Renaissance has been usefully revised in recent years -- but more of that later.)

"From Van Eyck to Bruegel" is a large show that keeps stopping you in your tracks, for all kinds of reasons. That the Met has extraordinary Netherlandish art is not news, but only a portion of it is regularly on view, divided among the Cloisters, the Lehman wing, and various other galleries. Seeing these dispersed works together is not only exciting, but also revelatory. One of the Met's most renowned pictures is the Merode Triptych (c. 1425-30) by the still enigmatic "Maitre de Flemalle," Robert Campin. Among the most innovative works of the period, the Triptych is a "rationalized" Annunciation, a mystical, supercharged event presented as though it were an ordinary happening in a thoroughly domestic Flemish interior: the angel seems to be waiting until Mary finishes the page she is reading, Joseph makes a mousetrap in his carpenter's shop on the right wing, and donors peer through the front door from a garden on the left wing. Scrupulous study has unravelled the complicated history of the Triptych's making, and has led recent opinion to assign the left panel to Campin's assistant, the stellar Rogier van der Weyden. Normally, the Merode Triptych hangs at the Cloisters, surrounded not by other paintings of the period but by furniture and a chandelier from fifteenth-century Flanders. In the current show at the Met, by contrast, it's in close proximity to pictures by Rogier and his assistants, which permits exciting comparisions to be made.

The initial impact of the show is bound up with this kind of eye-testing, absorbing confrontation. The gallery of fifteenth-century portraits, for example, gathers such familiar, deservedly celebrated works as Rogier's long-nosed Francesco d'Este, elegantly gripping an emblematic hammer, and Dieric Bouts's stern man at prayer in a jaunty red hat. There is Petrus Christus's shifty-eyed Carthusian, with his carefully parted beard, and Hugo van der Goes's exquisite young man, with his modish stubble. The stars are Hans Memling's glorious portraits of Tommaso Portinari and his wife Maria Baroncelli, owner of one of the most beautiful (and frequently painted) necklaces in the history of art. The portraits are newly reframed to reveal the artist's conceit of presenting the Portinaris as though seen against window embrasures.

This stunning group is made more so by the presence of equally splendid works from the Lehman Collection, usually isolated from their confreres: Christus's goldsmith in his shop with clients, Memling's introspective young man by a window, and Jean Hey's enchanting portrait of an elaborately dressed, bejewelled, ten-year-old Margaret of Austria, her Hapsburg lip turned into a childish pout. And apart from the pleasure of seeing these well-known pictures together in a new and informative context, there is an unexpected bonus: the addition of a wholly unfamiliar, rather stiff but sensitive painting of an elderly man at prayer, striking for its delicate rendering of white stubble and soft, sagging jowls, tendrils of sparse curly hair, and the fur lining of a winter garment. Now ascribed to Campin's workshop during the years when van der Weyden was an influential assistant there, the little portrait, perhaps the donor panel of a devotional diptych, has only recently been cleaned and removed from storage to join its relations -- including that donor panel of the Merode Triptych.

This is the most exhilarating aspect of "From Van Eyck to Bruegel" not the number of terrific, important works on view that you know from years and years of frequenting the museum, but the number of almost equally terrific ones that you've never seen before and the complex relationships that link the entire collection.

Admittedly, some major figures of the period are either absent or represented only by workshop pieces. Among the autograph works, the only van der Weyden in the Met's collection is the portrait of Francesco d'Este, the only van Eyck the densely packed, luminous little diptych of the Crucifixion and the Last Judgment, the only Bruegel the great golden landscape of hay-making. Still, the Met has the largest collection anywhere of individual pictures (as opposed to major altarpieces) by Gerard David, a fine selection made even more impressive by key additions: a pair of mysterious, virtually unprecedented forest scenes, for example, have been borrowed from The Hague's Mauritshuis to be reunited with the rest of the Met's Nativity Triptych (c. 1510-15) where they once served as the exterior panels.

Few works in the Met's Netherlandish collection are of the exalted level of the van Eyck diptych, the Bruegel landscape, or the best of the portraits, but the show intelligently frames even less distinguished pictures. A section on workshop practice makes vivid the working life of the artist in a period when he was still regarded as a skilled craftsman turning out a highly specialized product. Related images from different sources attest to the popularity (and gradual transformation) of certain conceptions -- the Madonna nursing the Christ Child, for example -- while model drawings, the precious raw material, handed down from father to son, of any successful workshop, provide evidence of how these images were transmitted.

An informative, well-illustrated catalogue, paralleling the organization of the show, provides entries on individual works and essays on such themes as "Workshop Practice in Early Netherlandish Painting" "Portraiture: A Meeting of the Sacred and Secular Worlds" and "Bruegel, the Land, and the Peasants." Other articles explore patronage, clientele, and markets for Netherlandish art during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as well as the history of its more recent reception in this country -- which goes a long way toward explaining why the Met has what it does.

The most provocative essay examines connections between Netherlandish artists and Italy -- not, as we might suppose, a recounting of how that northern invention, oil paint, quickly supplanted tempera as the medium of choice for ambitious painters, but a history of taste, a meticulous tracking of patronage and collecting that reminds us that, for much of the fifteenth century, Netherlandish, not Italian, art was the most sought after throughout Europe. The Franco-Burgundian culture of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Flanders was chic in elevated Italian circles of the period. (Quattrocento court composers were virtually all imported from Flanders, so it's not surprising to find a parallel interest in Netherlandish painting.) Italians in Flanders because of the wool trade patronized Netherlandish painters. Medici bankers in Bruges sent northern paintings back to Florence. Even connoisseurs who never left Italy collected Flemish art and, sometimes, Flemish artists. That paragon of humanist princes, the hawk-nosed Federigo da Montefeltro, patron of Piero della Francesca, invited Joos van Gent to his ducal court at Urbino because "he could not find in Italy painters in oil to suit his taste." Federigo's in-laws, the Sforzas, were similarly fond of Netherlandish art and so were the d'Estes and the Gonzagas.

That Flemish composers ruled Italian music in the early years of the Renaissance is easily proved: the distinctive notation of surviving compositions announces the origin of the author. Only diligent study of inventories and old records can uncover many of the Flemish paintings that found their way into Italian collections, since many have disappeared. (Some of the more inventive may have been burned on Savonarola's bonfires). But even lost works are known from descriptions whose detail and admiring tone bear witness to how highly these pictures were esteemed. Their importance is affirmed, too, by the echoes of Netherlandish style that resound through Italian painting of the quattrocento.

Startling as it may be to anyone brought up to believe that Italy was Europe's acknowledged leader in the innovations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the abundant evidence of Italian enthusiasm for Netherlandish art -- including the documented presence of particular Flemish works in Italy -- has led modern scholars to see the "Gothic" aspects of quattrocento painting not simply as a persistent survival of earlier aspirations, but as a positive response to northern paintings. The crabbed eccentricities of Ferrarese pictures, are seen as inspired by Flemish grotesquery. (It's worth remembering that the Ferrarese court was home to some of the most important Netherlandish composers of the day.) Similarly, Mantegna's crisp modelling and incisive drawing, even when he is meticulously depicting classical motifs, takes on new meaning in this context. So does the proliferation of anecdotal detail in Venetian painting before Giorgione and the maniera moderna (and after, in Carpaccio and Lorenzo Lotto), which starts to seem related to early Netherlandish pictorial norms. And so do the dreamy landscape backgrounds of Giovanni Bellini's pictures: fields and crags bathed in late afternoon light, punctuated with towns and castles, ploughmen and shepherds, livestock and birds. "Flemocentrism" even embraces Leonardo da Vinci. Nothing to do with effects bound up with the properties of oil paint, it's because of the fantastic rocky settings of his Virgin with Saint Anne and the Mona Lisa.

The catalogue is full of meat, to be consumed at leisure. "From Van Eyck to Bruegel" comes down just after New Year's Day 1999. "I wish they'd leave the installation just the way it is now" a colleague said at the press preview. If only.

(1) "From Van Eyck to Bruegel: Early Netherlandish Painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art" opened on September 22, 1998 and will remain on view until January 3, 1999. A catalogue of the exhibit, by Maryan W. Ainsworth and Keith Christiansen, has been published by the Metropolitan Museum and is distributed by Harry N. Abrams (464 pages, $75; $45 paper).

Karen Wilkin's latest book is Morandi (Rizzoli).