In 1984 the Getty Museum acquired an exceptional collection of Italian Renaissance maiolica, or tin-glazed earthenware. These often brilliantly colored objects range from an early Florentine jar with relief-blue decoration to a much later Mannerist dish with grotesque ornament. The collection was the subject of Italian Maiolica, a beautifully illustrated catalogue that the Museum published in 1988. Italian Ceramics amplifies and updates the earlier volume, including objects—some of them porcelain and terracotta—acquired during the intervening years. Among them are a pair of eighteenth-century candlesticks representing mythological scenes and a tabletop with hunting scenes; and, from the 1790s, the beautifully modeled and painted Saint Joseph with the Christ Child. Italian Ceramics contains the most recent scientific, historical, and iconographic information about the Museum’s holdings. Completely revised and expanded, this book offers a wealth of new information about the Getty Museum’s superb collection, which spans more than four centuries of Italian ceramic art.

In The Globalization of Renaissance Art: A Critical Review, Daniel Savoy assembles an interdisciplinary group of scholars to evaluate the global discourse on early modern European art. Over the course of eleven chapters and a roundtable, the contributors assess the discourse’s goal of transcending Eurocentric boundaries, reflecting on the strengths and weaknesses of current terms, methods, theories, and concepts. Although it is clear that the global perspective has exposed the artistic and cultural pluralism of early modern Europe, it is found that more work needs to be done at the epistemological level of art history as a whole. Contributors: Claire Farago, Elizabeth Horodowich, Lauren Jacobi, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Jessica Keating, Stephanie Leitch, Emanuele Lugli, Lia Markey, Sean Roberts, Ananda Cohen-Aponte, and Marie Neil Wolff.

Students and scholars of the Italian Renaissance easily fall under the spell of its achievements: its self-confident humanism, its groundbreaking scientific innovations, its ravishing artistic production. Yet many of the developments in Italian ceramics and glass were made possible by Italy's proximity to the Islamic world. The Arts of Fire underscores how central the Islamic influence was on this luxury art of the Italian Renaissance. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the Getty Museum on view from May 4 to August 5, 2004, The Arts of Fire demonstrates how many of the techniques of glass and ceramic production and ornamentation were first developed in the Islamic East between the eighth and twelfth centuries. These techniques - enamel and gilding on glass and tin-glaze and lustre on ceramics - produced brilliant and colourful decoration that was a source of awe and admiration, transforming these crafts, for the first time, into works of art and true luxury commodities. Essays by Catherine Hess, George Saliba, and Linda Komaroff demonstrate early modern Europe's debts to the Islamic world and help us better understand the interrelationships of cultures over time.