Getty Villa

How to Get There

From Santa Monica: Take Pacific Coast Hwy north toward Pacific Palisades and continue along the coastline until reaching the entrance located just off the highway.

Overview

The Getty Villa is at the easterly end of the Malibu coast in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. One of two locations of the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Villa is an educational center and museum dedicated to the study of the arts and cultures of ancient Greece, Rome, and Etruria. The collection has 44,000 Greek, Roman, and Etruscan antiquities dating from 6,500 BC to 400 AD, including the Lansdowne Heracles and the Victorious Youth.

The 64 acres museum complex sits on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean, which is about 100 feet from the entrance to the property. To the west of the Museum is a 450-seat outdoor Greek theater where evening performances are staged. To the northwest of the theatre is a three-story, 15,500-square-foot building built into the hill that contains the museum store on the lower level, a cafe on the second level, and a private dining room on the top level.

Gardens

There are four different gardens on the grounds of the Getty Villa, planted with plants native to the Mediterranean and known to have been cultivated by the ancient Romans.The largest garden is that of the Outer Peristyle, an exact proportional replica of the one at the Villa dei Papiri. The garden is 308 by 105 feet, with a 220 feet long pool at the center. Traditional Roman landscaping designs are replicated with manicured bay laurel, boxwood, oleander, and viburnum shrubs. Copies of Roman bronzes excavated at the Villa dei Papiri and elsewhere are scattered throughout the garden.

Just west of the Outer Peristyle is the Herb Garden, where traditional herbs sourced from ancient Roman texts are cultivated along with a variety of fruit trees: pomegranate, fig, apricot, apple, citrus, and pear. The garden is surrounded by grapevines, and bounded by an olive grove planted on terraces above the garden. The East Garden is small and secluded, surrounded by laurel and plane trees. Its chief feature is an exact replica of the famous shell and mosaic fountain at the House of the Great Fountain in Pompeii, but there is also a circular fountain at the center of a basin filled with aquatic plants, around which the garden is oriented. The fourth and final garden is that of the Inner Peristyle. Like the Outer Peristyle, a long, narrow, marble lined pool forms the centerpiece of the landscaping; along each side are replicas of bronze female statues from the Villa dei Papiri, modelled to appear as if they are drawing water from the pool. In each corner of the garden is a replica white marble fountain, and there are also several bronze copies of famous Greek sculptures like the Doryphoros and busts of Greek philosophers like Pythagoras and Democritus.

Collection

The collection has 44,000 Greek, Roman, and Etruscan antiquities dating from 6,500 BC to 400 AD,of which approximately 1,400 are on view. Among the outstanding items is Victorious Youth, one of few life-size Greek bronze statues to have survived to modern times. The Lansdowne Heracles is a Hadrianic Roman sculpture in the manner of Lysippus. The Villa also has jewelry and coin collections and an extensive 20,000 volume library of books covering art from these periods. The Villa also displays the Getty kouros, which the museum lists as "Greek, about 530 B.C., or modern forgery" because scientific analysis is inconclusive as to whether the marble statue can be dated to Greek times. If genuine, the Getty kouros is one of only twelve remaining intact lifesize kouroi. The Marbury Hall Zeus is an 81 in tall marble statue that was recovered from ruins at Tivoli near Rome.

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "Getty Villa", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0