Irresistible decay

Incendiary Art uses the collections of the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities - prints, drawings, illustrated books, manuscripts, and other objects - to investigate the vibrant imagery produced in an unprecedented flourishing of representations of fireworks and fireworks spectacles in Europe from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries.

Concentrating more on the records of these events than the events themselves, Incendiary Art examines these images as vehicles of meaning within the larger context of European culture and politics, without losing sight of their status as artifacts with an independent aesthetic life. Incendiary Art examines pyrotechnics within categories ranging from the theory of the sublime, to politics, poetics, erotics, aesthetics, and volcano lust.