Latest Issue of Getty Research Journal Is Now Available

The Getty Research Institute is pleased to announce the publication of the Getty Research Journal, issue number 15.

First published in 2009, the Getty Research Journal presents peer-reviewed articles on the visual arts of all cultures, regions, and time periods. Topics relate to Getty collections, initiatives, and broad research interests. The journal welcomes a diversity of perspectives and methodological approaches and seeks to include work that expands narratives on global culture.

This issue features essays on hairstyles of Roman matrons in the 2nd century CE; a notebook of designs by 18th-century Italian architect Filippo Baldi; French photographer Hippolyte Bayard’s images of the 1848 Revolution; an album of 19th-century photographs by Hippolyte Bayard at the J. Paul Getty Museum; drawing manuals for women in the 1850s and 1860s by French artist Marie-Élisabeth Cavé; the restoration studio Maison Kiewert in Paris and the practice of active conservation in the first decade of the 20th century; the 1943 book Amazonia by Brazilian artist Maria Martins; a watercolor illustration depicting the urban Century City project developed by the firm Welton Becket & Associates; metaphor and intermediality in artist Claes Oldenburg’s poetry between 1956 and 1962; and an integrated approach to research-based 3-D modeling in digital art and architectural history.

Abstracts from Getty Research Journal, no. 15:

Immersive Renaissance Florence: Research-Based 3-D Modeling in Digital Art and Architectural History

Fabrizio Nevola, Donal Cooper, Chiara Capulli, and Luca Brunke
While visualizations of various types—such as maps, 3-D models, and animations—have become staples in digital humanities approaches to art and architectural history, how to integrate analog data (artworks and drawings, archival documents, and so on) into born-digital outputs remains a fundamental concern. This article discusses processes developed through ongoing work on the art historical visualization project Florence4D. It proposes an integrated approach where technologies for 3-D models, mapping, and location-aware augmented reality (AR) converge, while the research data is no more than a click away in structured ontology databases. The structure of the underlying data is key to creating a collaborative research space where the three broadly defined spatial technologies of 3-D and augmented reality, GPS, and geoinformation systems (GIS) interact, enabling researchers to move seamlessly between building-, local-, and urban-scale analysis and the interpretation of art, architecture, and urban design history.

“The Future of Women Is the Future of the Nation”: Marie-Élisabeth Cavé’s Drawing Manuals and Art Education in 19th-Century France

Delanie Linden
French artist Marie-Élisabeth Cavé (ca. 1809–83) was a successful watercolorist whose works were frequently exhibited at the Parisian Salons and whose art manual Le dessin sans maitre: Méthode pour apprendre à dessiner de mémoire (1850; Drawing without a Master: The Cavé Method for Learning to Draw from Memory, 1868) achieved wide acclaim with multiple editions in the 19th century. Yet Cavé has not received much scholarly attention today. This article recovers the history of Cavé and repositions her as an agent of her own success. The simplicity and autonomy of her novel technique, which used repetition to cultivate visual memory, permitted students of all backgrounds to learn to draw. According to artist Eugène Delacroix, Cavé’s method was the only one that could meet the demands of a growing industrial nation. Remarkably, within these treatises, Cavé marshaled the medium of the art manual to inscribe her own ideas about women’s education and work, and to encourage women in 19th-century France to become professional artists.

The Notebook of Designs by Filippo Baldi at the Getty Research Institute

Costantino Ceccanti
Many unanswered questions persist about the life and career of Filippo Baldi, an architect active in Pistoia in the early 18th century. A notebook of Baldi’s sketches at the Getty Research Institute clarifies aspects of his identity, elucidates the complexity of his style, and unshrouds some of the mystery that characterizes the architectural history of this period in Pistoia. Baldi’s notebook (ca. 1697–1733) contains 178 drawings in pen and ink pasted onto leaves in a vellum binding that held an original manuscript; several of the drawings are signed and dated. While the Palazzo Amati, Palazzo Marchetti, and the facade of the Santa Maria degli Angeli are three outstanding examples of his built architecture, the notebook at the GRI offers insight into other projects that may have remained on paper. In addition to drawings of interior decorations and church furnishings, there are a few studies of Roman architecture, especially structures with a Jesuit connection—suggesting that Baldi may have belonged to the Jesuit order—and projects for not only the Pistoia area but also Arezzo and Romagna.

Amazonia by Maria Martins: A Journey between Geography and Anatomy

Maria Clara Bernal
Brazilian artist Maria Martins (1894–1973) published the book Amazonia in 1943 as part of her exhibition New Sculptures at the Valentine Gallery in New York. Although the book featured photographs of some of the sculptures in the show, there are reasons to believe that it was not simply intended to function as an exhibition catalog. Instead, Amazonia can be regarded as a work in its own right, a textual and visual construction that unfolds the significance of the exhibited sculptures beyond their most salient features and themes. Drawing on information from archival material and a copy of the original book held at the Getty Research Institute library, this article explores Martins’s book, which brings together elements of geography, history, and anatomy to convey a vision of Brazil as her own imaginary territory.

Style from Below in the Roman Empire: A Bust of a Matron at the J. Paul Getty Museum

Eve D’Ambra
The portrait bust of a Roman matron in the J. Paul Getty Museum (79.AA.118) belongs to a type of sculptural portraiture whose features are distinguished from those of the leading imperial women of Rome. Dating to the first half of the 2nd century CE, this group of portraits of Roman matrons, mostly unidentified women of the middle-lower social ranks, displays striking depictions of mature faces and elaborate hairstyles. Close study of the coiffures suggests ways in which the women differentiated themselves from their peers while demonstrating that they belonged to the social group of urban, affluent, and well-appointed matrons. Their portraits neither copied nor entirely disregarded the styling of imperial or elite women; rather, they suggest a process of exchange in which motifs were selected, sampled, and altered through scale, arrangement, or the evocation of more precious adornment.

Traces of History: Hippolyte Bayard’s Photographs of the 1848 Revolution

Margaret Fields Denton
The aims of this study of four photographs by Hippolyte Bayard that were taken in Paris between 1848 and 1850 are twofold. One objective is to provide the historical details necessary to understand the ways in which the images engaged with events of the 1848 Revolution. The other is to bring attention to how photography’s contribution to the historical record differs from that of other visual media such as paintings, prints, and drawings. The fact that the photograph denoted a temporal specificity put Bayard in the unique position of being able to evince the transitional and ephemeral nature of the 1848 Revolution that so many of his contemporaries remarked upon.

The Many Lives of the Getty Bayard Album

Carolyn Peter
This essay looks at the J. Paul Getty Museum’s Bayard Album, a book filled with 167 photographs predominantly taken by pioneering French photographer Hippolyte Bayard (1801–87). It brings to the fore questions about Bayard’s processes, subjects, and network of British colleagues. The uncertainty surrounding the album’s compiler offers an opportunity to explore Bayard’s own role. While the album is undated, physical clues present evidence that it was one of the earliest photographic albums ever made. Thus, the compiler had to turn to non-photographic precedents for the presentation and sequencing of imagery. The various notations and 20th-century alterations found in the Getty album reveal its mutability, raising questions about whose hands this album passed through and how the various owners changed its meaning over the course of 180 years. This study demonstrates how the album genre complicates our understanding of cultural artifacts and the artists associated with them.

Intermediality and Metaphoricity in Claes Oldenburg’s Poetry

Nadja Rottner
This essay offers a close examination of artist Claes Oldenburg’s understudied visual and concrete poetry written between 1956 and 1962. It posits that Oldenburg’s art, irrespective of format or medium, is affected by his large-scale metaphorical bundle “art is a theater of vision,” and that this view of art originates in his poetry. Metaphors such as snapshot vision, the camera eye, and the cartoon eye are discussed as text-generating principles of intermediality in poems such as “Things to See” (1956), an untitled street poem (1959), “MANYELLS” (1959), “Wat I Makz Iz Konkrete Tawts” (1961), and “SONG” (1962). The essay demonstrates how intermediality and metaphoricity are connected and how poetry and sculpture from Oldenburg’s street and store periods are shaped by it.

The Maison Kiewert Restoration Studio in Paris and the Practice of Active Conservation

Guillemette Caupin
The Émile Rostain papers at the Getty Research Institute contain a rare collection of agendas and account books dating between 1900 and 1910. These reflect the activities and business of restoration studio Maison Kiewert, managed during this period by conservators Antoine-Édouard Chauffrey and Léon Govaert. Originally founded in Paris by Paul Kiewert in 1855, the studio became an emblematic place of painting conservation practice in the 20th century, perpetuating techniques and recipes inherited from 18th-century conservators François-Toussaint Hacquin and Émile Mortemard. The archive also documents crossings with dealers and collectors, and, significantly, the practice of active conservation, in which studio restorers collaborated with artists, treating works in the process of their making or soon after completion. Acting as adviser, technical assistant, and aid to creation, the restorer, whose interventions influenced the materiality of paintings, played an integral role in transforming the artistic production of the era.

Dreamscape Century City: Architectural Rendering, Mass Media, and the Temporal Imaginary of the Postwar Capitalist Enterprise

Marie-Madeleine Ozdoba
Although noted for their eye-catching colors and vibrant graphics, project renderings of mid-century modern architecture remain little discussed in the field of architectural history. Through the case study of a watercolor rendering of the Century City urban development in Los Angeles by Mario Valenzuela for Welton Becket & Associates, this essay describes the production of work by commercial illustrators for large architecture firms at the turn of the 1960s. It takes up the use of project renderings in the media by public relations staff and news editors and examines their reception by the general public in the context of the futuristic imagination of the time. Seen through this prism, project renderings appear as an instrument in the construction of a temporal imaginary of the postwar era in the United States. Widely featured in newspaper real-estate columns, these idealized visions of modern architectural and urban developments helped further the legitimacy of the capitalist enterprise to define and implement dreams of the future centered on technological progress.