The J. Paul Getty Museum Handbook of the Antiquities Collections, 2002, 272 p., 200 ill. coul., br. -

J. Paul Getty bought his first classical antiquity—a small terracotta sculpture—at auction in London in 1939. Over the next four decades, he became a passionate collector, and in the 1950s he created a trust for "the diffusion of artistic and general knowledge." Building on that early foundation, successive antiquities curators at the Getty Museum have amassed a collection that now contains more than fifty thousand ancient objects. In lively prose accompanied by a full-color photograph of each object, this handbook of the antiquities collection presents nearly two hundred of the Getty Museum's most important pieces, including J. Paul Getty's most prized possession, the Lansdowne Herakles. Spanning thousands of years—from preclassical times as far back as the third millennium B.C. through the third-century A.D.—the Getty antiquities collection encompasses Cycladic, Greek, Etruscan, South Italian, Roman, and Romano-Egyptian cultures.It includes one of the finest assemblages of ancient Greek vases in the United States; monumental marble sculptures and diminutive bronzes; Greek and Roman gems; and Hellenistic silverware, jewelry, and glass. The handbook includes a foreword by museum director Deborah Gribbon and an introduction tracing the history of the collection by antiquities curator Marion True.