Masterpieces Of The J Paul Getty Museum Decorative Arts

The J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection of European sculpture featured in this volume ranges in date from the late fifteenth century to the very early twentieth and includes a wide variety of media: marble, bronze, alabaster, terracotta, plaster, wood, ivory, and gold. The earliest sculpture represented is the mysterious Saint Cyricus by Francesco Laurana; the latest is a shield-like portrait of Medusa by the eccentric Italian sculptor Vincenzo Gemito. Among the more than forty works included in this handsomely illustrated volume are sculptures by Antico (Bust of a Young Man); Cellini (a Satyr designed for Fontainebleau); Giambologna (a Female Figure that may represent Venus); Bernini (Boy with a Dragon); and Carpeaux (Bust of Jean-Léon Gérôme). Well represented here is the Museum’s splendid collection of Mannerist and early Baroque bronzes, including such masterpieces as Johann Gregor van der Schardt’s Mercury and two superb works by Adriaen de Vries: Juggling Man and Rearing Horse. These works are indicative of the extraordinary quality of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection of post-Classical European sculpture.

This beautifully illustrated work brings together more than one hundred objects from the J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection of European decorative arts. Included here is a generous selection of French and Italian furniture from the mid-sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Masterpieces by André-Charles Boulle, Bernard (II) van Risenburgh, and others reveal the virtuoso craftsmanship that makes these objects such compelling examples of the furniture maker’s art. Many of the Museum’s finest pieces of porcelain, glass, and tin-glazed earthenware are also represented. Tapestries from Gobelins and Beauvais, bronze firedogs from Fontainebleau, and a lathe-turned ivory goblet of astonishing complexity from Saxony are among the other highlights of this handsome volume.

This beautifully illustrated work brings together more than one hundred objects from the J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection of European decorative arts. Included here is a generous selection of French and Italian furniture from the mid-sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Masterpieces by André-Charles Boulle, Bernard (II) van Risenburgh, and others reveal the virtuoso craftsmanship that makes these objects such compelling examples of the furniture maker’s art. Many of the Museum’s finest pieces of porcelain, glass, and tin-glazed earthenware are also represented. Tapestries from Gobelins and Beauvais, bronze firedogs from Fontainebleau, and a lathe-turned ivory goblet of astonishing complexity from Saxony are among the other highlights of this handsome French-language volume.

The Getty Museum's collection of illuminated manuscripts, featured in this book, comprises masterpieces of medieval and Renaissance art. Dating from the tenth to the sixteenth century, they were produced in France, Italy, Belgium, Germany, England, Spain, Poland, and the eastern Mediterranean. Among the highlights are four Ottonian manuscripts, Romanesque treasures from Germany, Italy, and France, and English Gothic Apocalypse, and late medieval manuscripts painted by such masters as Jean Fouquet, Girolamo da Cremona, Simon Marmion, and Joris Hoefnagel. Included are liturgical books, devotional books for private use, books of the Bible, histories by Giovanni Boccaccio and Jean Froissart, and a Model Book of Calligraphy.

"From third-millennium-B.C. marble statuettes to gem-encrusted gold jewelry of the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., the collection of antiquities in the J. Paul Getty Museum testifies to the extraordinary skill and artistic achievements of sculptors, potters, painters, metalsmiths, and other artisans of the ancient Mediterranean world. Indicating both the quality of the individual pieces and the range of the collection, this volume illustrates many of the outstanding objects, among them a rare life-size Greek bronze statue depicting a victorious youth and J. Paul Getty's personal favorite, the marble statue known as the Lansdowne Herakles. Also included are a number of Greek and Etruscan terracotta vases, bronze and marble sculpture, and delicate late Classical and Ptolemaic gold jewelry."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

J. Paul Getty began to collect French decorative arts in the 1930s and continued to do so until his death in 1976. The Museum’s collection has continued to grow since then at a rapid pace and contains over three hundred individual pieces at the time this book is published. This volume illustrates fifty of them. The selection represents a cross section of the collection, which covers the period from approximately 1660 to 1800. In the eighteenth century it became fashionable in Parisian society to decorate the interiors of houses with Far Eastern materials such as lacquer and porcelain. This taste was catered to by the marchands-merciers, members of a guild who combined the functions of the modern interior decorator, the antique dealer, and the picture dealer. These men devised highly ingenious settings for Far Eastern porcelains to adapt their exotic character to the French interiors of the period. Information about them and their clientele has been used in cataloguing the Getty Museum’s collection of mounted oriental porcelain, which is large and of high quality. This book is not a catalogue, nor is it a mere picture book or checklist. Each piece has been chosen because it represents a particular aspect of the crafts involved in the production of objects that were made by Parisian craftsmen for the crown, the nobility, and the rich bourgeoisie. The pieces are arranged in chronological order. Translations of the French archival extracts, an index, and a concise bibliography have been provided.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the most common method of photography was the daguerreotype—Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre’s miraculous invention that captured in a camera visual images on a highly polished silver surface through exposure to light. In this book are presented nearly eighty masterpieces—many never previously published—from the J. Paul Getty Museum’s extensive daguerreotype collection.