The J. Paul Getty Museum, commonly referred to as the Getty, is an art museum in Los Angeles, California housed on two campuses: the Getty Center and Getty Villa.The Getty Center is located in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles and features pre-20th-century European paintings, drawings, illuminated manuscripts, sculpture, decorative arts, and photographs from the inception of photography through present day from all over the world. The original Getty museum, the Getty Villa, is located in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles and displays art from Ancient Greece, Rome, and Etruria.
Although gems were experienced primarily through sight in antiquity, as today, they also stimulated other senses: touch, obviously, but also occasionally hearing, taste, and even smell, not only for the craftsmen who fashioned them but also for those who owned, used, and wore them on their bodies. This essay explores diverse sensory experiences aroused by Greek and Roman gems, utilizing the thirty-seventh book of Pliny the Elder's Natural History and other ancient sources. It also addresses non-canonical senses-such as scale, memory, time, place, movement, rhythm, well-being, and wonder-that were stimulated by these marvellous miniature objects in diverse contexts.
Through a discussion of late medieval parchment dry-finishing methods and hitherto little-recognized invisible scarf-joined repair techniques, this article ‘surfaces’ these methods by introducing a ‘view from our fingertips’ to consider the touch of their makers. In doing so, an argument is made for the inclusion of sensory experience, particularly touch and sight, into the definition of technê. Through visual, technical, and historical analysis, this contribution explores how the craft sensitivities of late medieval parchment repairers reached the perceptual limits of touch. The ‘invisible’ repairs described and measured represent a craft specialty that, by the fourteenth and fifteenth century in Europe, aimed to rival the regularity and relative consistency of paper.
