San Francisco's Legion of Honor museum has a deal for you: two spectacular shows for the price of one. Each show offers the virtues of rarity and historical importance, and each includes objects of great beauty.

The first show – "The State Museums of Berlin and the Legacy of James Simon" – tells the story of a philanthropist and collector who gave magnificent objects, such as a bust of ancient Egyptian Queen Nefertiti and a 15th century painting of a Madonna and child by Andrea Mantegna, to nine German museums in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The second – "Leonardo da Vinci Drawings From the Biblioteca Reale in Turin" – presents one of the most sublime drawings of the human face done by the Renaissance master, as well as figure studies, equine images, drawings of insects and Leonardo's "Codex on the Flight of Birds."

The Berlin show features about 150 works, ranging from ancient Mesopotamia to 19th century France; the Leonardo, 11 drawings (but what drawings!) and the codex. While the shows are radically different in size, they are both of the highest quality, and they complement each other in that they offer archetypal images of feminine beauty.

While the famous painted bust of Nefertiti is too fragile to travel, a model from the studio of Tuthmosis gives us a glimpse of the queen's exquisite profile. A small silver point drawing of a woman's face that served as a model for the angel in Leonardo's extraordinary painting "The Madonna of the Rocks" is incomparable in its perfection.

There's an interesting back story to the Berlin show. In 2006, Bay Area residents Tim and Ann Simon visited Berlin on a family trip. Tim Simon introduced himself to the directors of the Berlin museums as a descendant of Eduard and James Simon, who were wealthy businessmen in late 19th century Berlin.

Eduard and James, who made their fortunes as cotton purveyors, gave one-third of their sizable annual income to charity, supporting both social causes and the museums of their city. In all, they gave about 20,000 objects to the State Museums of Berlin, among them important ancient artifacts from excavations that James supported in Egypt and Babylon.

Thanks to James Simon, the Berlin Egyptian museum has one of the world's richest collections of ancient Egyptian art from Tell el Amarna, and the Pergamon Museum in Berlin has a world-famous reconstruction of the Babylonian Ishtar Gate and its processional way. In addition to the model for the bust of Nefertiti, the Legion of Honor show includes clay brick fragments assembled into the form of lions that led the way to the Ishtar gate.

Other rare ancient objects on view include a cuneiform tablet with passages from the Epic of Gilgamesh, and delicate wood, stone and bronze figures from Egypt and Mesopotamia, among them an image of Queen Tiye, the mother of Akhnaton, and the head of a bull from Ur.

James Simon also supported excavations in Central Asia that recovered rare items from the northern part of the Silk Road, the subject of the Asian Art Museum's current show of treasures from Afghanistan. Here you will find a holy stupa of red sandstone and a wooden statue of an 11-headed Bodhisattva of Compassion. The Central Asian works give way to a series of Ukiyo-e Japanese prints from Simon's Far Eastern collection, most of which was lost in World War II.

The Mantegna "Virgin With Sleeping Child" is the highlight of the old-master works in the show, although Luca Giordan's "Saint Michael Slaying the Devil" and Bernardo Strozzi's "Salome With the Head of Saint John the Baptist" are flashier pieces from the baroque period. An interesting sidelight of the exhibit is a group of European folk-art objects and a model of a Frisian farmhouse of a type that has all but disappeared.

The most recent objects in the show are the least interesting, including a not-so-hot Renoir painting of a young lady and a Courbet landscape, both 19th century French. More interesting is a small and typically romantic night scene by German artist Caspar David Friedrich.