The J. Paul Getty Museum JOURNAL Volume 21/1993 Including Acquisitions /1992 EDITORIAL BOARD BARBARA C. ANDERSON Collections Projects Administrator BURTON B. FREDERICKSEN Senior Research Curator PETER FUSCO Curator of Sculpture and Works of Art GEORGE R. GOLDNER Curator of Drawings Curator of Paintings DEBORAH GRIBBON Associate Director and Chief Curator THOMAS KREN Curator of Manuscripts Adjunct Curator of Paintings WESTON NAEF Curator of Photographs MARION TRUE The J. Paul Getty Museum Journal is published Curator of Antiquities annually in December. Manuscripts should be submitted no later than October i for JOHN WALSH consideration for the next year's issue. Director For more information about the Journal, GILLIAN WILSON contact the editor, The J. Paul Getty Museum Curator of Decorative Arts Journal, P.O. Box 2112, Santa Monica, California 90407-2112. Subscription and back- issue requests should be sent to the J. Paul CHRISTOPHER HUDSON Getty Museum Distribution Center at the Publisher same address. JOHN HARRIS The paper and binding in this book meet the Editor guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. Abbreviation: GettyMusJ Unless otherwise specified, all photographs are courtesy of the institution owning the work illustrated. © 1993 The J. Paul Getty Museum 17985 Pacific Coast Highway Malibu, California 90265-5799 (310) 459-7611 ISBN 0-89236-256-1 ISSN 0362-1979 Contents THE Introduction: The Collections and the Year's Activities 5 J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM JOHN WALSH JOURNAL pift-eenth.Centuj-y Illumination and the Work of Pedro de Toledo 11 BARBARA C. ANDERSON VOLUME 21 1993 A Hellenistic Portrait Head 29 ARIEL HERRMANN A Self-Portrait Drawing by Jonathan Richardson 43 JILL FINSTEN The Master of Getty Ms. 10 and Fifteenth-Century Manuscript 55 Illumination in Lyons LYNN F. JACOBS The Sarcophagus of Titus Aelius Evangelus and Gaudenia Nicene 85 PETER J. HOLLIDAY ACQUISITIONS / 1992 Notes to the Reader 102 Drawings 122 Antiquities 103 Decorative Arts 139 Manuscripts 111 Sculpture and Works of Art 143 Paintings 115 Photographs 149 Trustees and Staff List 164 This page intentionally left blank 5 Introduction: The Collections and the Years Activities This account of the Museum's year in 1992 has to be colonies of South Italy decorated with a marvelously partly secondhand, since I was away from July through expressive incised drawing of lounging satyrs. Three December. A sabbatical at Oxford gave me a chance to fine Greek and Roman bronze statuettes belonged to read, write, and reflect on nine years at the Getty the group as well as three remarkable vases and a Museum. My absence seemed not to slow the Muse­ splendid Greco-Roman marble statuette that may re­ um's pace at all: great works of art were bought, large flect the lost Olympian Zeus by Phidias. projects advanced, and the public was treated to an Our Hellenistic goldsmiths' work was made exciting program of events. For most directors an stronger by the addition of a beautiful laurel wreath of absence of this length would be unthinkable. It was a type not previously represented in the collection. only possible for me because I had the generous under­ The Museum is already strong in metal vessels and standing of the Getty Trust, especially its president now can begin to show the brilliance of Greek crafts­ and CEO, Harold Williams, and because I knew that manship in jewelry. the Museum's two associate directors, Deborah Grib- Among other acquisitions of the department was bon and Barbara Whitney, could serve as acting direc­ a tiny bronze Roman head of Demosthenes, very like tors with the greatest skill and confidence. They did. the bronzes found in the Villa dei Papiri in Her- culaneum, on which the Museum's building is based. The orator is portrayed with the harsh features of a THE COLLECTIONS champion of a lost cause—that of the Greeks against the Macedonians. The slump in the art market that has accompanied a The DEPARTMENT OF MANUSCRIPTS acquired a worldwide economic decline during the past few years major manuscript, one of the most delightful Gothic persisted in 1992. There was relatively little benefit for examples in private hands, the so-called Bute Psalter. us, however. It was largely a seller's market for the It is especially notable for the elegant, energetic fig­ best and rarest objects in all fields, and prices for these ures and the drolleries and grotesques that embellish continued to either hold their own or go up. This the margins. An initial A with Three Marys at the Tomb meant that the rate of our purchases did not recover in of about 1460-70 by the eccentric Lombard illumina­ 1992 from the slowdown of the late 1980s, when a tor Bartolomeo Rigossi is remarkable for its lush sur­ relatively fixed (though large) annual acquisitions face of gold and yellow highlights. budget was squeezed by ever-rising prices. Neverthe­ We had the satisfaction of locating eighty-one less, the results in 1992 were impressive. long-lost text pages from a northern French Gothic THE DEPARTMENT OF ANTIQUITIES made several antiphonal whose illuminated leaves were acquired major purchases, the most important being a group of with the Ludwig collection in 1983. The text pages works from a single private collection in New York. have a refined beauty of their own and, when rebound These include an astonishing ensemble of Hellenistic with the illuminated pages, will restore the appearance jewelry that was almost certainly made in Ptolemaic of the original book. Alexandria during the late third or early second cen­ The five purchases made for the DEPARTMENT OF turies B.C. These pieces are not only among the finest PAINTINGS in 1992 included some remarkable rediscov­ ever to appear but are also entirely intact. Part of the eries. A Venus and Adonis by Titian, considered a same purchase was a bronze helmet from the Greek workshop version of the picture painted for the King 6 Walsh of Spain in 1554, proved to be a well-preserved auto­ ing the story of the ill-fated Adonis. graph work of exceptional liveliness and strength. Another group of remarkable Italian drawings Despite its distinguished earlier history it had hung was purchased, including several previously unknown for years high on the wall of an English house. A sheets connected with important commissions. Lead­ completely unknown early Rubens in nearly perfect ing the list is a preparatory study by Mantegna for his condition—a scene of Samson pulling the Philistine altarpiece in the church of San Zeno in Verona, begun temple down around his head—came to light and was in 1476. This becomes our second study for this bought in 1992. The painter, who was in his twenties, masterpiece. A keenly expressive chalk drawing by had already absorbed the lessons of the late Renais­ Bronzino of a man's hand was made in preparation sance painters in Venice and Rome and commanded an for the artist's Deposition, which was begun in 1542. astonishing virtuosity. Another splendid sixteenth-century drawing, also un­ A pair of wings of a lost altarpiece by Fra known until recently, is Andrea del Sarto's chalk study Angelico provided a rare chance to add the work of of male figures at a balustrade, our fourth drawing by this wonderfully expressive painter to the collection. this great Florentine master. Another lost painting, which had reappeared in a An energetic compositional study by Pietro da London auction, is the great portrait of Pope Clement Cortona for the Crucifixion altarpiece he painted in VII by Sebastiano del Piombo. Painted by the pope's the early 1660s came to the Getty, one of the relatively court artist in about 1531, it is a somber, glowing few highly important Italian Baroque drawings to image of worldly power. come on the market recently. Finally, among many Rubens s older contemporary in Antwerp, Jan other Italian examples is the large Allegory of the Life of Breughel, painted many versions of a scene in which Canova by the Neoclassical painter Felice Giani, a all the creatures of the Earth are marshaled to enter design for an elaborate memorial to the sculptor, who Noah's ark. The best of these works of art was at the time of his death in 1822 was the most cele­ acquired by the Museum in 1992. brated artist in the world. Thirty-two paintings from the collection, mostly Most acquisitions for the DEPARTMENT OF DECO­ Italian, were sold at auction in 1992, and the proceeds RATIVE ARTS continue to serve the specific purposes of applied to the purchase of paintings of vastly greater completing installations planned for the new Museum importance. None of those sold were of potential use in Brentwood. There were exceptions in 1992, how­ for exhibition; all had been relegated to storage in ever. The most impressive is a tapestry from the cele­ recent years, and many were too damaged to show. brated series Les Anciennes Indes woven at the THE DEPARTMENT OF DRAWINGS made twenty- Gobelins factory during the reign of Louis XIV. It seven purchases. These included a group of German represents a scene in Brazil full of real and imagined and Swiss drawings, the rarest of which was the large inhabitants—natives, birds, fish, and animals, includ­ sheet of studies of peonies made by Martin Schon- ing a striped horse and (improbably) a rhinoceros. gauer for his masterpiece, The Madonna of the Rose Fabulous in another way is the turned ivory object Garden of 1473. This is the only known watercolor produced by Frangois Barreau around 1800. The piece, study from nature by this pioneer German artist, who which has defied our efforts to title it, must have been opened the way for the discoveries of Durer.