Dutch sculptor Adriaen de Vries (1556-1626) spent much of his life working for the most discerning royal courts of the age, including that of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. A master of composition and technique, De Vries was relatively unkno...

This book celebrates the recently installed collection of 20th-century sculpture donated to the Getty Museum in 2005 by philanthropist agent-turned producer Ray Stark. This sumptuous book takes readers on a visual tour of the J. Paul Getty Museum's n...

Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) was an intrepid artist and scientist who defied the conventions of her time to pursue her passion for documenting the natural world in all its glorious, and sometimes ferocious, detail. Between 1699-1701, she travelle...

Louis de Carmontelle was an eighteenth-century French draftsman, painter, and garden designer. In 1783, he began painting a series of panoramas on translucent paper that, when cranked through a backlit viewing box gave viewers the experience of journ...

From antiquity to the Enlightenment, astrology, magic, and alchemy have always been considered important tools in unravelling the mysteries of nature and human destiny. As a result of the West's exposure to the astrological beliefs of Arab philosophe...

During the late sixteenth-century, successful Italian artist Federico Zuccaro (c. 1541-1609) created one of the period's most important series of drawings – twenty large sheets that depict the early life of his older brother Taddeo (1529-1566). Publi...

In the fourteenth century, Europe was a place ravaged by the effects of war and famine and then devastated by the Black Death. These multiple crises lead to a widespread mystical religiosity, which emphasised both ecstatic joy and extreme suffering....

Sister Wendy Beckett is one of the best-known art historians in the world today. In "Joy Lasts", she explores her reactions to a painting that she finds uniquely compelling: the haunting Christ on the Cross by El Greco. As she candidly admits, "I hav...

The Swiss scholar Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) was one of the first great historians of culture and art. In his manuscript on the genres of Italian Renaissance painting – still unpublished in the original German and published here in English for the...

Jean-Baptiste Greuze's diminutive picture of a rosy-cheeked girl wringing out her linen was one of fourteen works that he exhibited at the Salon of 1761 in Paris. This lively and engrossing book traces the history of the Getty Museum's painting, comp...