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The Getty Center

The Getty Center was fantastic. The architecture was at least as interesting and imaginative as the collections. We dashed through some of the collections. I was particularly taken with an exhibit of building an example of an exquisite marquetry desk. It took us along the steps from choosing the wood, the tools one would use, the methods, the raw cutting and planning, the fine cutting, the tiny marquetry cutting and slight shadowing with hot sand, the hot glue pasting held on with clamps and hot sand bags, and the final finishing. Amazing! We also saw an exhibit of illuminated manuscripts, including a Bestiary and a textbook containing the 7 liberal arts: The trivium (3 roads) of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and the quadrivium (4 roads) of mathematics (pure numbers), geometry (numbers in space), Music, Harmonics, or Tuning Theory (numbers in time), and astronomy (numbers in space and time). Wish Ben and Mia could’ve seen that! We also saw and exhibit of stained glass and learned that the painted lines were done with ground up glass in a slurry that was painted on and then fired, and the fired paint would end up shades of brown and black. Glass could also be painted with a silver nitrate that left a yellow when fired. We saw some French Impressionist art — but not much in the way of newer works.