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.

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.

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.

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, an English Gothic Apocalypse, and late medieval manuscripts painted by such masters as Jean Fouquet, Girolamo da Cremona, Simon Marmion, and Joris Hoefnagel. Included are glistening liturgical books, intimate and touching devotional books for private use, books of the Bible, lively histories by Giovanni Boccaccio and Jean Froissart, and a breathtaking Model Book of Calligraphy.

The collection of European drawings in the J. Paul Getty Museum, built up over a decade and a half, has increased steadily in both breadth and depth. While the holdings of drawings from the Italian Renaissance are particularly strong—including for instance, a double-sided sheet by Leonardo da Vinci—other schools, the French, in particular, are also well represented. The collection’s emphasis is on major draftsmen, such as David, Dürer, Gainsborough, Goya, Ingres, Piranesi, Poussin, Raphael, Rembrandt, Rubens, Tintoretto, Titian, Veronese, and Watteau, while the occasional acquisition of groups of drawings has added strength in certain areas, such as the German and Swiss Renaissance. Organized by national school, with artists represented chronologically within each, this volume focuses on the most important drawings in the collection, which admirably illustrate the development of European drawing from the Renaissance onward.

The Getty Museum's collection of drawings was begun in 1981 with the purchase of a Rembrandt nude and has since become an important repository of European works from the fifteenth through the nineteenth century. As in the first volume devoted to the collection (published in 1988 in English and Italian editions), the text is here organized first by national school, then alphabetically by artist, with individual works arranged chronologically. For each drawing, the authors provide a discussion of the work's style, dating, iconography, and relationship to other works, as well as provenance and a complete bibliography.

Provides a history of the buildings that have housed the Getty Museum collections, overviews the collections themselves, and offers a biography of J. Paul Getty