An illuminating intellectual biography of a pioneering and singular figure in American art history.
 
Art historian George A. Kubler (1912–1996) was a foundational scholar of ancient American art and archaeology as well as Spanish and Portuguese architecture. During over five decades at Yale University, he published seventeen books that included innovative monographs, major works of synthesis, and an influential theoretical treatise. In this biography, Thomas F. Reese analyzes the early formation, broad career, and writings of Kubler, casting nuanced light on the origins and development of his thinking.
 
Notable in Reese’s discussion and contextualization of Kubler’s writings is a revealing history and analysis of his Shape of Time—a book so influential to students, scholars, artists, and curious readers in multiple disciplines that it has been continuously in print since 1962. Reese reveals how pivotal its ideas were in Kubler’s own thinking: rather than focusing on problems of form as an ordering principle, he increasingly came to sequence works by how they communicate meaning. The author demonstrates how Kubler, who professed to have little interest in theory, devoted himself to the craft of art history, discovering and charting the rules that guided the propagation of structure and significance through time.

The Getty Research Journal is an open-access publication presenting peer-reviewed articles on the visual arts of all cultures, regions, and time periods. The journal will be published through Getty’s Quire software beginning with this issue and made available free of charge in Web, PDF, and e-book formats. 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 cultures.

This issue features essays on a fragmentary Kufic Qurʼan of Early Abbasid style produced in Central Iran; cuttings from a twelfth-century Bible written in southeastern France for a Carthusian monastery in the orbit of the Grande Chartreuse; French archaeologist Jane Dieulafoy’s nineteenth-century documentation of Ilkhanid monuments, particularly the Emamzadeh Yahya, one of Iran’s most plundered tombs; the wartime encounter between Polish painters stationed in Baghdad and Iraqi artists during the British military reoccupation of Iraq in 1941–45; and the integration of photography and poetry in East German samizdat artists’ books of the 1980s. Shorter texts include a notice on a large folding panorama of the city of Salvador in the state of Bahia, taken around 1880 by Brazilian photographer Rodolpho Lindemann.

The free online edition of this open-access publication is at www.getty.edu/publications/grj/19/ and includes zoomable illustrations. Free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book are also available.

A thoughtful look at representations of people experiencing poverty in early modern Europe.
 
The northern Italian artist Giacomo Ceruti (1698–1767) was born in Milan and active in Brescia and Bergamo. For his distinctive, large-scale paintings of low-income tradespeople and individuals experiencing homelessness, whom he portrayed with dignity and sympathy, Ceruti came to be known as Il Pitocchetto (the little beggar).
 
Accompanying the first US exhibition to focus solely on Ceruti, this publication explores relationships between art, patronage, and economic inequality in early modern Europe, considering why these paintings were commissioned and by whom, where such works were exhibited, and what they signified to contemporary audiences. Essays and a generous plate section contextualize and closely examine Ceruti’s pictures of laborers and the unhoused, whom he presented as protagonists with distinct stories rather than as generic types. Topics include depictions of marginalized subjects in the history of early modern European art, the career of the artist and his significance in the history of European painting, and period discourses around poverty and social support. A detailed exhibition checklist, complete with provenance, exhibition history, and bibliography, provides information critical for the further understanding of Ceruti’s oeuvre.
 
This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from July 18 to October 29, 2023.

The essential reference for anyone engaged in the material study of cast bronze sculpture.
 
Since the fourth millennium BCE, bronze has been the preferred medium for some of the most prestigious and sacred works of art. But only through interdisciplinary research can the fabrication of these extraordinary objects be properly investigated, interpreted, and documented. This innovative publication bridges the expertise of myriad art-technological specialists to create a new framework for advancing the understanding of bronze sculpture.
 
Essential reading for curators, conservators, scientists, archaeologists, sculptors, metallurgists, founders, dealers, collectors, and anyone interested in the life cycle of a bronze, this volume explains how to identify the evidence of process steps, metals used, casting defects, and surface work and alterations before moving on to address analytical techniques ranging from visual exams to imaging, material analyses, and dating. The guidelines are accompanied by detailed illustrations, including videos, charts, and animations; a robust vocabulary, ensuring precision across English, German, French, Italian, and Chinese; a diverse selection of case studies; and a comprehensive bibliography.
 
The free online edition of this open-access publication is available at getty.edu/publications/bronze-guidelines/ and includes videos and zoomable illustrations. Also available are free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book.

This richly illustrated volume paints a complex portrait of Caillebotte, masculinity, and identity in late nineteenth-century France.

More than any other French Impressionist, painter Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894) observed and depicted the many men in his life, including his brothers and friends, employees, and the workers and bourgeois in his Parisian neighborhood. Male subjects feature prominently in some of his best-known works, such as The Floor Scrapers, Man at His Bath, Young Man at His Window, Boating Party, and Paris Street, Rainy Day. The originality of his paintings of men is fully explored for the first time in this catalogue, published to accompany a major international exhibition co-organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Musée d’Orsay, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Alongside paintings, drawings, and photographs, as well as an appendix featuring maps and new biographical research that sheds light on Caillebotte’s social network, this volume includes historically grounded thematic essays by curators and leading scholars. By exploring the complex and varied facets of Caillebotte’s identity—as son, brother, soldier, bachelor, amateur, sportsman, and so on—these essays pose questions of identity, leaving space for ambiguous and fluid expressions of gender and masculinity—for both Caillebotte and the larger late nineteenth-century French world.

This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the Musée d’Orsay from October 8, 2024, to January 19, 2025, J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from March 25 to May 25, 2025, and The Art Institute of Chicago from June 29 to October 5, 2025.