Works of the Renaissance born again at the National Gallery

THIS beautiful and amply rewarding exhibition is devoted largely to the intense and jewel-like painting of the early Renaissance.

ODDLY enough, our interest in the Renaissance is something of a phenomenon of modernism, or at least of the past two centuries, although the idea of a rinascita or rebirth has a long history.

The leading figures of the movement, from the 15th century in Italy, saw themselves as engaged in reviving a civilisation that had collapsed and very nearly perished after the fall of the Roman Empire. Those ambitions culminated in the High Renaissance and in the renewal of the city of Rome itself under great popes such as Julius II.

By the mid-16th century, historian Giorgio Vasari could distinguish three phases of this process: a first in the 14th century, with Giotto and his followers, a second in the 15th, in the wake of Masaccio, and a terza maniera, equivalent to what we call the High Renaissance, initiated by Leonardo and epitomised by Raphael and Michelangelo.

Inseparable from the historiographical idea of revival or rebirth, however, was a depreciation of the achievement of the Middle Ages, which tended to be lumped in with the truly Dark Ages in the second half of the first millennium and were not rediscovered until the romantic period. Even the earlier stages of the Renaissance tended to be consigned to the category of a precursor period; the great modern tradition, as generally understood from the 16th to the 18th centuries, began with the High Renaissance.

It was the 19th century that rediscovered the so-called Italian primitives. The appellation is significant in hindsight and can be seen as an anticipation of the more radical primitivism of the 20th-century modernists. In each case the motivation was the search for alternatives to what was perceived as an etiolated academic tradition; in the history of artistic taste, in fact, the renewed appreciation of the Italian artists of the 14th and 15th centuries had as a direct consequence a devaluation of the baroque that lasted until the middle of the 20th century.

This rediscovery of the earlier artists was the beginning of the modern interest in the Renaissance, given the shape and prestige it enjoys today by a succession of great and influential authors: John Ruskin, Jacob Burckhardt, Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, Bernard Berenson, Heinrich Woelfflin. These writers were not antiquarians and their view of the Renaissance was not nostalgic; rather, they thought of its energetic, inquiring spirit as akin to that of the modern age.

The art of the Renaissance was also a central subject for the developing academic discipline of art history: Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) remains a classic, like the works of his successor in the chair of art history at Basel, Woelfflin, although the latter was in fact more concerned with defining the relation between the High Renaissance and the baroque. And Renaissance art was the main field for modern connoisseurship, whose most brilliant and celebrated practitioner was Berenson.

The authorship of pictures and other works of art can be identified in various ways, of which positive documentation is the most secure. In practice, however, experts rely to a large extent - in tandem with the use of documents where they are available - on the recognition of an artist's distinctive style. In general this is very much like recognising a face or perceiving the similarity between members of a family. But Berenson also employed a specific and quasi-scientific technique developed by Giovanni Morelli, who looked for the characteristic ways that a painter dealt with minor details such as fingernails or earlobes: the sort of pictorial handwriting that a forger, for example, would be likely to overlook.

Morelli was not only a celebrated connoisseur but also an important figure in the political life of Risorgimento Italy, eventually leaving much of his personal collection to the the art academy founded by and named after Count Carrara in Bergamo in the 18th century. Carrara had endowed the new institution with a considerable collection of pictures mainly drawn from the northern and Venetian schools of Italian painting. And this is the collection, including many of the works that belonged to Morelli, that has come to the National Gallery of Australia as the first exhibition in this country devoted to the art of the earlier Renaissance.

Despite the inevitable attempt to publicise the show on the strength of the biggest and most familiar names represented - Raphael, Titian, Botticelli and Bellini - this is not a collection of the giants of the Renaissance but it is none the worse for that. It is a beautiful and amply rewarding exhibition devoted largely to the intense and jewel-like painting of the early Renaissance and it is all the more fascinating for introducing the viewer to work not clouded for us by over-exposure.

The exhibition opens with a tiny but exquisitely painted devotional panel for a private altar by Jacopo di Cione. This little picture makes a fitting start because it reminds us of the care and patience that artists of this time invested in their work and of the distinct operations and different craftsmen who contributed to the final effect. The panel had to be cut and seasoned, then planed smooth, coated with gesso and polished perfectly smooth; then underpainted in red, covered with gold leaf, and marked and incised with decorative patterns -- all this before the master painter even picked up the brushes and applied the tempera paints that were mixed for him by an assistant.

Jacopo's work is intensely religious and reflects the anxious period in the 14th century following the devastation of the Black Death of 1348 that killed between one-quarter and one-third of Europe's population. This terrifying scourge brought a temporary halt to the cultural expansion of the early century, in the generation of Giotto and Dante. The well-known effects in art included a retreat from the Giotto's new sense of volume and space and a return to the relative flatness of this picture, in which figures standing behind each other are set higher, as though standing on steps.

Also expressive of spiritual crisis, more than a century later, are two pictures by Botticelli, the graceful poet of neo-platonism at the Medici court who later succumbed to Girolamo Savonarola's revivalist preaching. The tormented face of Christ is the more immediately striking, but the complicated and tragic story of Virginia, from the early history of Rome, is also a masterpiece of expressionistically contorted attitudes.

At the opposite extreme of sentiment is Giovanni Bellini's Madonna and Child in Front of a Landscape, undoubtedly the most absorbingly beautiful painting in the exhibition. You keep coming back to this picture, drawn by the charm of its mysterious luminosity and expressive serenity. The effect of brightness is partly, if unexpectedly, produced by the intense blue of the Madonna's robe, more faintly echoed in the sky.

Most of the artists in the exhibition, as already mentioned, are from the northern or Venetian schools of Italian painting, rather than the Florentine or Roman. The Renaissance was imported into these regions, rather than originating there, and this helps to explain the eccentric or retardataire nature of some of the works. Bellini was able to form a new and independent style, and became the master of Giorgione and Titian. The small but exquisite painting by the latter demonstrates his assimilation of new High Renaissance pictorial values that ultimately go back to Leonardo: broad masses of light and shade (chiaroscuro) support the composition, in place of the evenly lit scenes of the previous generation, and care is given to unifying foreground and background and ensuring that figures are integrated with their natural setting.

It is noteworthy that the new movement reached Venice through sculpture - with Donatello's stay in Padua from 1443 - yet the great Venetians developed the most painterly of styles, one that set light and tone above Florentine-Roman disegno or drawing, with its emphasis on volume and space; if disegno remained the backbone of subsequent modern art, Venetian colore became its necessary complement, in theory subordinate to drawing but often its rival in debates from the 17th to the 19th centuries.

Other northern artists, such as Cosme Tura and Carlo Crivelli, reveal more directly the sculptural source of their inspiration in hard, angular forms reminiscent of stone or metal. Sometimes, as in the work of Crivelli, these forms express a refined and neurotic sensibility, revelling in detail and a paradoxical combination of illusion and artifice. Generally, though, the northern schools are characterised by a love of naturalism; it is from these regions that Caravaggio and the Carracci would come at the end of the 16th century, bringing the mannerist interlude to an end with a renewed emphasis on the real.

This tendency to naturalism is visible, among so many examples, in Ambrogio Bergognone's picture of the Virgin breastfeeding the infant Christ, although mothers will note the dubious attachment of the nipple. It can be seen combined with slightly archaic stylistic models in Cavazzola's early triptych of six saints, where four are generalised figures, while the features of St Dominic and St Laurence are clearly portraits, although the naturalistic urge was mitigated by Leonardo's stay in Milan between 1482 and 1499; his influence can easily be seen in the work of Bernardino Luini and Andrea Solario.

One of the stars of the exhibition is Lorenzo Lotto. Lotto is often eccentric, yet a remarkable artist of enduring vision. For a beginner's lesson in connoisseurship, you could not do better than to look carefully at two paintings that hang side by side: Palma Vecchio's Virgin and Child with Sts John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene - all soft distant gazes, plump women without much neck - and Lotto's Holy Family with St Catherine, filled with movement and physical energy, and a complex interlocking of gazes, crackling like electricity around the mystery of the divine vision.

Renaissance, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, to April 9.