Search results for ""Getty Trust Publications""

The court of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II produced nothing more amazing than the "Mira calligraphiae monumenta", a brilliant demonstration of two arts-calligraphy and miniature painting. The project began when Rudolf's predecessor, Ferdinand I, commissioned master calligrapher Georg Bocskay to create a model book of calligraphy. A preeminent scribe, Bocskay assembled a vast selection of contemporary and historic scripts. Years later, at Rudolf's behest, miniaturist Joris Hoefnagel filled the spaces on each manuscript page with insects, fruits, flowers, and other botanical images. The combination of word and illustration is rare and, on its tiny scale, constitutes one of the marvels of the Central European Renaissance. Nature Illuminated reproduces forty-one pages from the original codex. Those who love and collect beautiful books will be endlessly fascinated by Hoefnagel's imagery and invention. The accompanying commentary identifies and explains the details of Hoefnagel's exquisitely crafted illuminations.

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A practical manual for the microscopic analysis of paint, coatings, fibres and adhesives - materials found in works of art.

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This volume is devoted to the smaller and more unusually-shaped works of Carleton E. Watkins, many of which have not been published before. The book also contains an overview of his life, and an edited transcript of a colloquium on his career.

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French Tapestries and Textiles is a survey of the Getty Museum's seventeenth-and eighteenth-century French textiles-one of the world's finest collections. Featuring twenty-five extraordinary tapestries woven at the Gobelins and Beauvais manufactories, the catalogue also highlights three carpets, two knotted-pile screens, and two sets of embroidered bed hangings, one of which is the only complete lit a la duchesse surviving from the period. Among the magnificent textiles discussed in this lavish volume are the Emperor of China tapestry series, the whimsical Story of Don Quixote, and Boucher's cycle The Story of Psyche. A gatefold in the book opens to reveal a photograph of the stately twenty-nine-foot carpet commissioned for Louis XIV's Galerie du Bord de l'Eau at the Louvre, a piece not publicly displayed for more than 120 years. Each entry includes a listing of artists and weavers, date and place of manufacture, and materials and techniques used, followed by a complete description and a condition statement. The accompanying commentary provides information on the literary, historical, and visual source of design imagery as well as the context of the textile's commission and production. In addition, each textile shown has a complete provenance, exhibition history, and bibliography. For lovers of French decorative arts and connoisseurs of textiles, this book offers a study both of the art of tapestry- and textile-making and of the aesthetic tradition exemplified by these remarkable objects.

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Jan Brueghel's elaborate 1613 painting entitled "The Entry of the Animals into Noah's Ark" is cleverly transformed into this look-and-find book for children. Twenty-five detailed illustrations prompt children to identify different kinds of animals while accompanying text shows the word for each animal in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Japanese. Each word is spelled phonetically, so parents can help children learn how to pronounce the foreign names correctly. A color foldout of the painting in its entirety makes it fun for young readers to locate each animal from Noah's Ark.

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This volume tells the singular story of an uncanny object at the cusp of art and science: a 450-year-old automaton known as “the monk.” The walking, gesticulating figure of a friar, in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, is among the earliest extant ancestors of the self-propelled robot. According to lore from the court of Philip II of Spain, the monk represents a portrait of Diego de Alcalá, a humble Franciscan lay brother whose holy corpse was said to be agent to the miraculous cure of Spain’s crown prince as he lay dying in 1562. In tracking the origins of the monk and its legend, the authors visited archives, libraries, and museums across the United States and Europe, probing the paradox of a mechanical object performing an apparently spiritual act. They identified seven kindred automata from the same period, which, they argue, form a paradigmatic class of walking “prime movers,” unprecedented in their combination of visual and functional realism. While most of the literature on automata focuses on the Enlightenment, this enthralling narrative journeys back to the late Renaissance, when clockwork machinery was entirely new, foretelling the evolution of artificial life to come.

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In 2019 Yale University, with the support of the Getty Foundation, held an international conference, where nearly four hundred attendees from more than twenty countries gathered to discuss a vital topic: how best to conserve paintings on canvas. It was the first major symposium on the subject since 1974, when wax-resin and glue-paste lining reigned as the predominant conservation techniques. Over the past fifty years, such methods, which were often destructive to artworks, have become less widely used in favor of more minimalist approaches to intervention. More recent decades have witnessed the reevaluation of traditional practices as well as focused research supporting significant new methodologies, procedures, and synthetic materials for the care and conservation of paintings on fabric supports. Conserving Canvas compiles the proceedings of the conference, presenting a wide array of papers and posters that provide important global perspectives on the history, current state, and future needs of the field. Featuring an expansive glossary of terms that will be an invaluable resource for conservators, this publication promises to become a standard reference for the international conservation community.

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Daily religious devotion in the Greek and Roman worlds centered on the family and the home. Besides official worship in rural sacred areas and at temples in towns, the ancients kept household shrines with statuettes of different deities that could have a deep personal and spiritual meaning. Roman houses were often filled with images of gods. Gods and goddesses were represented in mythological paintings on walls and in decorative mosaics on floors, in bronze and marble sculptures, on ornate silver dining vessels, and on lowly clay oil lamps that lit dark rooms. Even many modest homes had one or more religious objects that were privately venerated. Ranging from the humble to the magnificent, these small objects could be fashioned in any medium from terracotta to precious metal or stone. Showcasing the collections in the Getty Villa, this book's emphasis on the spiritual beliefs and practices of individuals promises to make the works of Greek and Roman art more accessible to readers. Compelling representations of private religious devotion, these small objects express personal ways of worshiping that are still familiar to us today. A chapter on contemporary domestic worship further enhances the relevance of these miniature sculptures for modern viewers.

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This is a rich exploration of the role the Baroque master played in the Counter-Reformation. The art of Rubens is rooted in an era darkened by the long shadow of devastating wars between Protestants and Catholics. In the wake of this profound schism, the Catholic Church decided to cease using force to propagate the faith. Like Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) sought to persuade his spectators to return to the true faith through the beauty of his art. While Rubens is praised for the "baroque passion" in his depictions of cruelty and sensuous abandon, nowhere did he kindle such emotional fire as in his religious subjects. Their colour, warmth, and majesty - but also their turmoil and lamentation - were calculated to arouse devout and ethical emotions. This fresh consideration of the images of saints and martyrs Rubens created for the churches of Flanders and the Holy Roman Empire offers a masterly demonstration of Rubens' achievements, liberating their message from the secular misunderstandings of the post-religious age and showing them in their intended light.

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Presented in very clear and accessible language, "Roman Art" offers new and fascinating insights into the evolution of the forms and meanings of Roman art. Traditional studies of Roman art have sought to identify an indigenous style distinct from Greek art and in the process have neglected the large body of Roman work that creatively recycled Greek artworks. In this fresh assessment the author offers instead a cultural history of the functions of the visual arts, the messages that these images carried, and the values that they affirmed in late Republican Rome and the Empire. The analysis begins at the point at which the characteristic features of Roman art started to emerge, when the Romans were exposed to Hellenistic culture through their conquest of Greek lands in the third century BCE. As a result, the values and social and political structure of Roman society changed, as did the functions and characters of the images it generated.

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This is a fascinating re-evaluation of the life and works of a hugely talented yet controversial artist. The young Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) created a major stir in late-sixteenth-century Rome with the groundbreaking naturalism and highly charged emotionalism of his paintings. "Caravaggio" is a sumptuously illustrated and engagingly written volume that takes a fresh look at Caravaggio's life and works, uncovering evidence that the efforts of Caravaggio's contemporaries to disparage his character and his artwork often sprang from their own cultural biases or a desire to promote the artistic achievements of his rivals, and that contrary to repeated claims, Caravaggio lacked neither education nor piety, but was an extremely accomplished technician who developed a successful marketing strategy.

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This is a concise yet detailed guide to the fundamental terms, materials, and techniques used to create textiles. Textiles have been made and used by every culture throughout history. However diverse - whether an Egyptian mummy wrapping, a Turkish carpet, Italian velvet, American quilt, or a Scottish kilt - all textiles have basic elements in common. They are made of fibres, constructed into forms, and patterned and coloured in ways that follow certain principles. "Looking at Textiles" serves as a guide to the fundamentals of the materials and techniques used to create textiles. The selected technical terms explain what textiles are, how they are made, and what they are made of, and include definitions of terms relating to fibres, dyes, looms and weaving, and patterning processes. The many illustrations, including macro- and micro-scale photographs of a range of ancient and historic museum textiles, demonstrate the features described in the text.

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As an integral part of human culture, music has been one of the most common themes in art throughout history. This book offers an exploration of the history of music in Western art, from ancient sculptures to modern art. It includes chapters devoted to individual instruments and sections focused on subjects such as musical symbols and allegories.

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As the Roman Empire expanded its borders into North Africa, thousands of mosaic floor pavements were designed and created to adorn the town houses and rural estates of the upper classes. As these Roman outpost flourished, so did mosaic art - particularly in Africa Proconsularis, a region comprising modern Tunisia. "Tunisian Mosaics", with more than 130 sumptuous full-colour photographs, is the perfect introduction to this extraordinary ancient art. The initial chapters look at the historical background of Roman Africa and discuss the development of art in and around the Mediterranean. Further chapters provide detailed profiles of Tunisia's major mosaic sites, and give virtual tours of the country's most important museum collections. The final chapter surveys the current initiatives in place to preserve these fabulous works for future generations.

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In his History of Early Rome, the ancient historian Livy tells the story of a Roman girl named Cloelia who was taken prisoner by Larth Porsena, the king of the Etruscans. Cloelia came up with a daring plan of escape from her Etruscan captors and in the process won the admiration of all Rome and of the Etruscan king himself, who freed her. For saving her city, a grateful Rome set up a statue in her honor, the first such ever to be put on the Sacred Way. Jane Louise Curry tells this exciting and true story in Brave Cloelia, beautifully illustrated by Jeff Crosby. Jane Louise Curry is the author of many books for young people, most recently Hold Up the Sky and Other Indian Tales of Texas and the Southwest and The Egyptian Box. Brave Cloelia is his sixth children's book.

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This comprehensive survey of Etruscan civilization, from its origin in the Villanovan Iron Age in the ninth century B.C. to its absorption by Rome in the first century B.C., combines well-known aspects of the Etruscan world with new discoveries and fresh insights into the role of women in Etruscan society. In addition, the Etruscans are contrasted to the Greeks, whom they often emulated, and to the Romans, who at once admired and disdained them. The result is a compelling and complete picture of a people and a culture. This in-depth examination of Etruria examines how differing access to mineral wealth, trade routes, and agricultural land led to distinct regional variations. Heavily illustrated with ancient Etruscan art and cultural objects, the text is organized both chronologically and thematically, interweaving archaeological evidence, analysis of social structure, descriptions of trade and burial customs, and an examination of pottery and works of art.

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A catalogue of the almost life-size porcelain animals created for the elector of Saxony and king of Poland, Augustus the Strong, in 1735. This was perhaps the most significant commission for porcelain ever executed in Europe. The text discusses the challenges and solutions the work demanded.

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A completely revised edition providing a practical, straightforward guide to the theory and practice of discipline-based art education, explaining how DBAE draws content from the disciplines of art-making, art criticism, art history and aesthetics.

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A vivid portrayal of life in Pompeii's sister city, this book includes a detailed description of the ancient Villa dei Papiri, on which the present Getty Museum in Malibu is modeled.

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This abundantly illustrated book examines the figure of Balthazar, one of the biblical magi, and explains how and why he came to be depicted as a Black African king. According to the Gospel of Matthew, magi from the East, following a star, traveled to Jerusalem bearing precious gifts for the infant Jesus. The magi were revered as wise men and later as kings. Over time, one of the three came to be known as Balthazar and to be depicted as a Black man. Balthazar was familiar to medieval Europeans, appearing in paintings, manuscript illuminations, mosaics, carved ivories, and jewelry. But the origin story of this fascinating character uncovers intricate ties between Europe and Africa, including trade and diplomacy as well as colonization and enslavement. In this book, experts in the fields of Ethiopian, West African, Nubian, and Western European art explore the representation of Balthazar as a Black African king. They examine exceptional art that portrays the European fantasy of the Black magus while offering clues about the very real Africans who may have inspired these images. Along the way, the authors chronicle the Black presence in premodern Europe, where free and enslaved Black people moved through public spaces and courtly circles. The volume's lavish illustrations include selected works by contemporary artists who creatively challenge traditional depictions of Black history.

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