Press and Publications

The Getty Villa

Jorge Silvetti and Marion True.

The Getty Villa is a lively history of the J. Paul Getty Museum and its renowned antiquities collections, its growth from a small museum in Mr. Getty's house in Malibu to its first home in the Villa building, and its third incarnation as a museum exclusively devoted to antiquities. Most engagingly, this book records the ten-year adventure in reconfiguring a beautiful but topographically challenging site into one that could continue to accommodate the splendid Museum building and also provide for an outdoor theater, laboratories for conservation work and research, offices for staff and visiting scholars, and an education program for adults and children.

This book is available from the Villa Bookstore, or Amazon.com

Seeing the Getty Villa

This book captures the visual delights, both man-made and natural, of the newly renovated Getty Villa. More than seventy color photographs artfully record the stunning architecture and grounds of the site. Visiting the new Villa will reap numerous aesthetic rewards, for all the senses. Seeing the Getty Villa will surely reward the visual one. The book is a tour guide in image and text, taking readers into and through the site itself. The visual narration continues into the refurbished Museum building, with stops for readers to admire the galleries of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan works of art before perusing the landscaped gardens, fountains, wall paintings, mosaics, and newly built outdoor amphitheater. In sum, the lush pictures and concise words compose a portrait of a place that will enchant and surprise.

This book is available from the Villa Bookstore, or Amazon.com

Guide to the Getty Villa

A Guide to the Getty Villa begins with a history of the site and J. Paul Getty's decision to house his growing collections in a structure designed to replicate an ancient Roman villa, now called the Villa dei Papiri. The second chapter of the book recounts the destruction of the Villa dei Papiri in a.d. 79 in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and its rediscovery in the eighteenth century. The third chapter takes readers through the Getty Villa, beginning with the cobblestone "Roman road" and the dramatic new entranceway, and then into the Museum entry court and sun-filled atrium, into the outdoor theater and then to the Museum galleries. Special rooms, such as the Basilica, the Hall of Colored Marbles, and the Temple of Herakles, are described in more detail before the gardens, which are modeled on ancient Roman gardens, are explored. The final chapter describes the installation of the collections.

This book is available from the Villa Bookstore, or Amazon.com