Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770) was the greatest Italian painter of the eighteenth century, best known for his monumental frescoes and epic altarpieces. The scale of these paintings is immense, even overpowering. Yet some of Tiepolo's finest work ca...

Bernardo Bellotto's magnificent View of the Grand Canal provides a rich visual record of life in eighteenth-century Venice. This painting one of the most popular in the Getty Museum is so sweeping in its scope and so detailed that it requires repeate...

As archetypes of human virtue and vice, the gods and heroes of Ancient Greece and Rome have figured prominently in Western culture. In art, they have been portrayed time and time again, especially during the Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassical peri...

In viewing the great works of sacred Western art, many people find difficulty in understanding the stories and identifying the figures portrayed in them. This informative guide decodes these often-mysterious scenes and reveals a vibrant world of imag...

Reassessing the complex career of one of the most influential yet controversial experimental artists of the early 20th century, this volume of essays looks at the prolific painter, designer, architect and photographer, El Lissitzky (1890-1941), who w...

Much of the sculpture created in ancient Greece that has survived is funerary in nature. These markers commemorating the dead were traditionally placed along roads near the entrances to cities, where they could be seen by all. Although the monuments...

During the Renaissance, a book of hours was intended for private devotional use by the laity as an expression of the desire to imitate the prayer life of nuns and monks. This manuscript was created in 1469 by Taddeo Crevelli, one of the major illumin...

The Spitz book of hours is one of the finest French manuscripts in the collections of the Getty Museum. It is also one of the most original and inventive manuscripts painted in the International style. "The Spitz Master", its primary illuminator, all...

"Gustave Le Gray's" life was as romantic as any novel. A young painter in Rome, then a fashionable portrait photographer in Paris, Le Gray received commissions from Napoleon Ill, and astonished viewers with his painterly landscapes and ravishing seas...

This missal from the mid-12th century was used in the Church's liturgical rites. The major illuminated pages are reproduced along with a text that explains the iconography and historical context of the manuscript. The manuscript is one of the most vi...