An icon (from the Greek word eikon, "image") is a wooden panel painting of a holy person or scene from Orthodox Christianity, the religion of the Byzantine Empire that is practiced today mainly in Greece and Russia. It was believed that these works a...

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 Getty Museum inaugurates a new series of affordable publications that introduce the public to the richness of its holdings in illuminated manuscripts. The first in the series features Italian manuscript illumination from the ninth to the sixteent...

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 In his manuscript on the genres of Italian Renaissance painting – still unpublished in the original German and published here in English for the...

Born in Brussels and trained by his grandmother, Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625) was called "Velvet Brueghel" for his skill at painting rich and delicate textures. The biblical story of Noah's ark provided a subject well suited to Brueghel's abili...

In this fascinating exploration of Jan Steen's "The Drawing Lesson", John Walsh offers an explanation of the individual parts and larger patterns of the work, allowing us to see how each prop and pose contributes to the larger theme – the art of pain...

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...

The Dutch artist Joachim Wtewael (1566-1638) was a history painter especially admired for his astonishing small paintings on copper. The Getty's Museum's Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan is one of his finest works in this unusually demanding medium...

American painters and graphic artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sought inspiration for their work in the uniquely American experience of history and nature. The result was a transformation of the conventional Old World visual languag...

Although oil remains an important binding medium in artists' paints, today's synthetic resins are being used with increasing frequency. This was true during much of the twentieth century, when artists such as David Alfaro Siqueiros, Jackson Pollock,...