Revolutionary Views

National Gallery Show Does a 360

Some of the greatest art of the Italian Renaissance came from trying to make a cliche come true.

Renaissance talkers used to get big yuks out of a debate they dubbed the Paragone ("the Comparison"), in which sculpture fans took on the pro-painting crowd. (Remember, they were still waiting for reality TV.) The sculpturists' favorite ploy was to point out that even the best painting was stuck showing a figure from a single point of view. Which -- gotcha! -- clearly left sculpting as the greater art, since it could give a viewer access to all sides of a figure.

A winning gambit, in theory. But in practice, most statues of that day still had one side that was the obvious "front," with other views clearly taking a back seat. Faced with a statuette of a naked nymph, what Renaissance prince was likely to spend time gazing at her back and hair, when her more expressive face and front were there for the looking?

Enter Giambologna, the great Flemish-born sculptor (known in his native land as Jean Boulogne) who moved to Italy in 1554 and whose work is at the heart of the National Gallery exhibition "Bronze and Boxwood: Renaissance Masterpieces From the Robert H. Smith Collection." More than anyone else, Giambologna forced European sculpture to live up to its defenders' bromides. Finally, here was a sculptor whose works really had to be turned every which way if you wanted to take in all the best they offered.

A good number of the 54 tabletop sculptures featured in the current show are by Giambologna himself, or are closely based on his designs. Much of what's left is deeply indebted to his work. Anyone who saw the Smith collection show five years ago, in its first rather smaller version at the gallery, will probably remember the impression made by Giambologna's works. But, since he may be one of the most under-touted geniuses in the history of art, it doesn't hurt revisiting his greatness.

A foot-tall statuette showing a great, nude Hercules tossing around his servant Lichas -- the hero, made mad by poison, is about to throw the naked boy into the sea -- is a bronze version of a work originally commissioned from Giambologna in silver around 1589. It's a tangle of writhing limbs that point in all directions and that break free from any solid block that could contain them.

Already, that distinguishes the work from much of what had come before, since earlier sculptures had tended to respect the block of stone -- real, in marble's case, or imaginary in the case of bronze -- that they'd come out of. Giambologna's wrestling match is as much about the air its limbs push through, and the empty space that pierces its middle, as it is about the solid matter it's made of.

And then there's the fact that, when you look at the enraged face of Hercules from the statue's "front," all you see is his uprooted victim's vulnerable, twisting rear. It's the hero's-eye view of things. Turn the piece around and hold it high to get a look at Lichas's tortured face, down almost at the level of the sculpture's base, and you end up looking up, from the servant's own topsy-turvy position, at his master's hugely muscled back and shoulders. It's the victim shot from a Hollywood fight scene.

Go to one of the sculpture's sides, and the work's classical nudity is relatively decorous. Look from the other, at the boy's splayed legs, and the work's inherent homoeroticism comes into play.

You can almost test the Giambolognism of other works in this show by checking out how well they can rotate. There's a doe-eating lion that can be looked at either to see the fury of the predator or, from another side, the terror of his prey. There's a crouching female bather, partly wrapped in a towel, who, depending how you look, is either turning away from your prying glance or twisting round to catch it.

This is a revolution, in the most literal sense.

Of course, statues made before Giambologna are also worth looking at, from one or several sides.

A stunning little work from 1503, by the great Mantuan sculptor always known as Antico -- after his love for ancient art -- shows a seated nymph who is as beautifully classical in profile as she is when seen full-face. (That profile is like a Roman coin fleshed out to 3-D.) Yet you're as likely to admire all the stunningly varied textures of the statue's bronze surfaces -- the stamped pattern on the rough tree trunk the nymph is sitting on; the gilded sweep of drapery that covers her lap; the tight coils in her golden hair -- as the varied views it offers of its subject.

The show also includes a display case full of desktop bronzes made in or around the workshop of Antico's even greater colleague, Riccio (who may almost outdo Giambologna for unfair neglect). They have a different take on surfaces. Rather than demonstrating all the ways cast bronze can be finished after it's come from the mold, it concentrates on using bronze to capture the rougher, more impressionistic surfaces of the original wax models that precede the metal casting. Somehow, these utilitarian objects' fanciful subjects -- a dragon opening its jaws to double as a lamp; a sphinx also offering a flame; a satyr holding an inkwell -- are a perfect match for the flamboyant, inspired touch that gets preserved in them. Looking at them from one side gives more than enough pleasure.

Finally, the collector celebrated in this show has tastes that range beyond Renaissance bronzes, which leads to the "boxwood" in the title. It refers to a case or two containing a number of little statuettes -- carved from boxwood, as well as other fine-grained hardwoods and also ivory -- mostly by the sculptor Leonhard Kern, who worked in Germany two generations after Giambologna came to Italy. They're not a close fit with the other objects on display, but their workmanship is stunning: Kern managed to make his wood look as slick as polished metal. And their willingness to explore the ugly and mundane, in a chunky bowler and an old woman with pendulous breasts, shows just how far European tastes could roam from a tidy classicism. Kern, observes National Gallery curator Nicholas Penny, "does classical hair, then puts it on the greengrocer's daughter."

"Not," he adds, "that I have anything against the greengrocer's daughter."

Bronze and Boxwood: Renaissance Masterpieces from the Robert H. Smith Collection is on view through May 4 in the West Building of the National Gallery, on the north side of the Mall at Sixth Street NW. Call 202-737-4215 or visit http://www.nga.gov.