Curated Collections

Curated Collections are groupings of digitized materials organized around shared themes or research interests. By bringing together items from multiple contributing institutions, these collections enhance discoverability of materials and offer a compelling entry point for study.

The Getty Research Portal’s Curated Collection of Anatomy and Art, spanning the 16th to early 20th centuries, focuses on illustrated human anatomy. For centuries, the structure of the human body was a fundamental concern of both medicine and art. In Europe, anatomical atlases, introduced during the Renaissance, provided new visual maps to the body. Anatomist, draftsman, and printmaker collaborated—sometimes with a single individual performing multiple roles—to transform knowledge into representation.

Anatomy was long a basic component of artistic education, and artists were a recognized part of the market for anatomical illustration. Anatomy was often included in early printed drawing manuals and, in the 17th century, the first books on anatomy specifically for artists appeared. All these genres are represented in this curated collection.

Discover titles in the Anatomy Collection on the Getty Research Portal

The Manly Palmer Hall collection residing at the Getty Research Institute was acquired in 1995 from the estate of the Los Angeles theosophist and founder of the Philosophical Research Society in Los Feliz. Included among these are books from the 16th to 19th centuries dealing with the art and science of alchemy.

Though the collection was originally acquired for its contribution to the history of visual symbolism, alchemy is now also recognized as a key to the history of materiality in the arts. In addition to their influential allegorical and fantastical imagery, alchemical texts record recipes and techniques for applications across the visual arts, including pigments, dyes, metal alloys, and effects in glass, as well as the acidic washes of etching and lithography.

Alchemy, called “the great art” in medieval Europe, also speaks to essential ideas about human creativity and the relationship between art and nature, which have infused the history of art from antiquity to the present day.

Discover titles in the Art and Science of Alchemy collection on the Getty Research Portal

The Art of the Ancient Americas Collection includes books that explore the history of discovery, collection, interpretation, and display of art of the Indigenous Americas, focusing largely on Mesoamerica and the Central Andes. These sources include facsimiles of original works made by Indigenous scribes and artists; early efforts by Europeans to understand Indigenous artistic traditions of the Americas; interpretive works written by antiquarians, travelers, collectors, and early archaeologists; records of institutional and private collections of ancient American art; and exhibition catalogs from the 20th and 21st century. Collectively, this resource comprises materials that pertain to the Getty Research Institute’s Pre-Hispanic Art Provenance Initiative.

Discover titles in Art of the Ancient Americas on the Getty Research Portal

The Getty Library’s collection of botanical books illustrates the broad scope of the study of plants, primarily in Europe, from the late 15th to early 20th centuries.

Art’s imitation of nature took obvious deep roots in botany, and the field has long stood at the intersection of art and natural science. Since antiquity, botanical science fundamentally impacted medicine, pharmacology, and color theory and practice, just as landscape architecture—and, consequently, urban planning—were fundamentally transformed by developments in botanical cultivation.

The curated collection for Botany offers paths for research into such subjects as herbals and pharmacopeia; artisanal manuals with recipes for preparing botanical paint pigments and textile-dyes; and artistic guides to floral symbolism.

Other avenues of study reveal how the advent of printing led to the proliferation of illustrated natural histories and helped spawn a European Wunderkammer culture from the 16th century onward. One can also examine both developments in the hand-coloring of books and innovations in color printing techniques.

Books on the subject of botany in the Getty Library collection have been greatly enhanced by the generous donations of Tania N. Norris.

Discover titles in the Botany collection on the Getty Research Portal

The Digital Cicognara Library is an international initiative to recreate in digital form the remarkable private book collection of Count Leopoldo Cicognara (1767–1834). Though assembled in the Romantic era, Cicognara’s collection of some 5,000 early imprints forms the foundational literature on art and archaeology. Cicognara’s famous two-volume inventory of his library, the Catalogo ragionato dei libri d’arte e d’antichità, published in 1821 and often reprinted, remains an essential tool for scholars and bibliophiles.

The Digital Cicognara Library site features the 1821 Catalogo ragionato, combined with black-and-white facsimiles of the original volumes now housed in the Vatican, high-resolution digitized versions of unique matching copies from partner libraries, and thorough bibliographic information.

Discover titles in the Cicognara Library collection on the Getty Research Portal

The Getty Library houses an array of works on food and historical cookbooks dating from the 15th to 20th centuries. The majority are part of the collection of world-renowned Le Cordon Bleu chef Anne Willan and her husband Mark Cherniavsky, which includes hundreds of rare books and prints. The books contained in this curated collection are primarily in English and French, with some also in Latin, Italian, and several other European languages.

Within the library are some very early illustrated cookbooks, including Bartolomeo Scappi’s Opera (1570), which includes 27 engravings of Renaissance kitchens and culinary equipment. Many of the texts reveal the dining habits of royalty, including Le maître d’hôtel français (1823) containing menus for Tsar Nicholas I and King George IV, and several works by Queen Victoria’s chef Charles Elmé Francatelli. The collection also has a 15th-century edition of John Cassian’s rules for a monastic order and Hannah Glasse’s bestselling The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy (1747).

Discover titles in the Historical Cookbooks collection on the Getty Research Portal

“Letters exist in a divine realm, combining and descending to illuminate us.”
—al-Fārābī, Abū Nasr ([Iranian], ca. 870-943), Kitāb al-hurūf (“Book of Letters”)

“[There are] things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

This curated collection of rare books and manuscripts explores the nature of the word as a visual entity. It includes examples from such subjects as typographic proportion, calligraphy and penmanship, engraved reproductions of paleographic specimens, and printed attempts at introducing non-Roman alphabets and syllabaries to European audiences. There are also philosophical works discussing the origin and nature of language and the evolution of letterforms. Found as well are links to imaginary alphabets, stenographic symbols, cryptographic codes, and, in some cases, the ciphers used to decode them.

Discover titles in the Letters and Words collection on the Getty Research Portal

The Photography Incunabula collection includes books from the 1840s through the 1870s, illustrated primarily with salted paper prints or albumen prints. These were the first photographic media viable for publication purposes, and the production of such books was very labor-intensive: the images were printed individually from paper or glass negatives and then mounted manually onto the pages.

Together, the pioneers of photography and the publishers of these innovative books used the new medium to experiment aesthetically, to showcase photography’s various capabilities (such as accuracy of detail), and to share the ever-expanding frontiers of knowledge—both geographically and scientifically.

Discover titles in the Photography Incunabula collection on the Getty Research Portal

In his 1958 publication La invención de América (The Invention of America), the Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman stated that America was not just discovered but invented. This selection of illustrated books and prints highlights the creation of the mythologies that arose during the exploration of the Americas by Europeans and reveals the influence that those myths and utopian visions have had on defining the continents.

The collection on the Portal comprises publications and prints by European chroniclers, explorers, travelers, and artists from the 16th to 19th centuries. It features objects from the Reinventing the Américas exhibition at the Getty Research Institute.

The collection contains numerous illustrations depicting the peoples and landscapes of the Americas. These images highlight the duality in the representations of the Americas, including portrayals of Indigenous people as innocent good savages versus bloodthirsty cannibals, and the depiction of the Americas as paradise versus a land populated by fantastic, terrifying animals. The collection also examines the work of 19th-century travelers in the Americas who used a more scientific approach to the representation of local topics but still contributed to the construction of questionable realities.

Discover titles in the Reinventing the Américas collection on the Getty Research Portal