"African Presence in Renaissance Europe," at Walters Museum Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid "The Three Mulattoes of Esmereldas" (1599) is one of the works in "Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe," at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. BALTIMORE - In a fall art season distinguished, so far, largely by a bland, no-brainer diet served up by Manhattan's major museums, you have to hit the road for grittier fare. And the Walters Art Museum here is not too far to go to find it in a high-fiber, convention-rattling show with the unglamorous title of "Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe." Visually the exhibition is a gift, with marvelous things by artists familiar and revered - Dürer, Rubens, Veronese - along with images most of us never knew existed. Together they map a history of art, politics and race that scholars have begun to pay attention to - notably through "The Image of the Black in Western Art," a multivolume book project edited by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr. - but that few museums have addressed in full-dress style. Like the best scholarship, the Walters show, organized by Joaneath Spicer, the museum's curator of Renaissance and Baroque art, is as much about questions as answers, and makes no bones about that. Many wall labels begin with an interrogative, suggesting that a museum visitor's reading of a particular image carries as much weight as the curator's. And, like most ambitious but risky undertakings, it has flaws. There is evidence of budget limitations. Although no corners were cut in getting crucial European loans, the catalog - a good one - has come in a third smaller in size than planned and with signs of changes-at-the-last-minute production. The presence of a chatty "resource center" midway through the show, with gamelike audience-participation activities on offer, will rile museum purists. I have no problem with it. And, in a show that tackles the issue of race head-on, the line between an objective view of the past taken on its own terms and interpretation of it in light of the present can sometimes feel precariously drawn. But in the end none of this matters. The show is so interesting to look at and so fresh with historical news as to override reservations. It does what few museum shows ever do: It takes a prized piece of art history, one polished to a glow by generations of attention, and turns it in an unexpected direction, so it catches the searching, scouring rays of new investigative light. Europe's ties to Africa were ancient but sporadic. Particularly strong bonds were forged during the heyday of the Roman Empire. And in the 15th and 16th centuries, the period covered by the Walters show, they were renewed. True, as early the eighth century a pocket of intercontinental culture had sprung up in Muslim-occupied southern Spain. But it wasn't until that occupation was coming to a close that a broader exchange began. By the mid-1400s an expansionist Europe was hungry for new materials and markets, and a globally minded Roman Catholic Church sought new members. Well before Vasco da Gama first sailed around Africa, Portuguese merchants had opened trading depots along its west coast. And enterprising Africans were coming to Europe. In 1484 a Congolese delegation visited Lisbon on a diplomatic mission, and Ethiopian Christian pilgrims were establishing permanent communities in Rome. Superficially Africa and Europe had embarked on an age of cosmopolitan rapport, an idea promoted in art. It was during this period that the convention was introduced of including a black African as one of the three foreign kings in images of the Adoration of the Magi. A beautiful early-16th-century Flemish example and one with, exceptionally, two black figures, tenderly particularized, opens the Walters show on a utopian note, with a vision of multicultural harmony. In reality harmony was rarely associated with Africa in the European mind. Known primarily secondhand from sensationalizing ancient texts, the African continent was often depicted in the Renaissance as a place of freakish beasts and bestial, violence-prone, naturally subject peoples. The attitude found its place in Renaissance decorative objects like oil lamps and door pulls cast in the shape of African heads, and in paintings that routinely included dark-skinned figures as servants or slaves. Slavery had a long institutional history in Europe, and for centuries most slaves were white, from the eastern Mediterranean and Russia. The source changed with the beginnings of an African slave trade in Europe in the mid-1400s. And the complexion of European art, subtly but surely, changed with it.