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The Getty Center is hosting a four-course luncheon fashioned after the traditional Italian family meal style of dining on Sunday. Diners will feast on platters of Italian-inspired dishes made with locally sourced foods while sipping on Prosecco and leisurely listening to the sounds of Trecento music from Renaissance Florence. Sunday's menu features antipasti with cheese and cured meats accompanied by house-baked breads, lamb and pork sausage meatballs, braised short rib tagliata and, for dessert, a traditional Tuscan torta della Nonna made with vanilla and lemon zest.

When Timothy Potts became the director of the Getty Museum in September, he knew he was stepping into an anomaly of a job, unusual within the ranks of America's most prestigious museums. Other museum heads, bound by tight budgets, must essentially beg private collectors for donations of money and artwork. Potts, thanks to the $5.3-billion endowment of the Getty Trust, is under pressure to spend money instead of raising it. So how is his wish list for acquisitions coming? "I don't have one," said Potts, 54, in his first interview on the job. Or believe in them: "You need to be opportunistic when pursuing works of the highest quality.

Timothy Potts has made his first major purchase as the new Getty Museum director: He bought Lieven van Lathem's illuminated manuscript Roman de Gillion de Trazegnies for $6.2 million at Sotheby's Wednesday night in London. The manuscript includes eight half-page miniatures, like the one shown in detail above. There are only three other manuscripts containing this story of a nobleman's adventures in Egypt. In a statement, Potts called it a “richly illustrated manuscript by the greatest illuminator of the Flemish High Renaissance.” In an interview with the L.A. Times for a story in the Dec. 9 Arts & Books section, he described manuscripts as a potential growth area for the Getty, while praising the current collection.

The Cyrus Cylinder - the famous ancient Babylonian artifact that is one of the British Museum's most prized possessions - will come to the Getty Villa in 2013 as part of a U.S. tour to five museums. The tour will begin in March at the Smithsonian's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington and then proceed to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, where it is expected to be on view from Oct. 2 through Dec. 2, 2013.

The Cyrus Cylinder -- the famous ancient Babylonian artifact that is one of the British Museum's most prized possessions -- will come to the Getty Villa in 2013 as part of a U.S. tour to five museums. The object is expected to go on display at the Getty Villa from Oct. 2 through Dec. 2, 2013. The tour will begin in March at the Smithsonian's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington and then proceed to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and finally the Getty in Pacific Palisades.

Who is Pacino di Bonaguida? Giotto we know. Giotto di Bondone (about 1267-1337), the star with Pacino of a new exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, was Italy's first painter of world significance. FOR THE RECORD: "Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance": In the Nov. 13 Calendar section, a photo caption that accompanied an art review of the Getty Museum's "Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance" identified Taddeo Gaddi as the creator of a work showing the Virgin Mary and Sts. Thomas Aquinas and Paul.

According to a report released Thursday, the Getty's $12-million investment in Pacific Standard Time, the sprawling collaboration among Southern California museums, has generated almost 10 times that amount in spending by tourists and local residents. The report, prepared for the Getty by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation, put total visitor spending, including lodging, food and transportation, at $111.5 million and state and local taxes generated at $19.4 million.

Almost everything you need to know about the prodigious talents of Ray Metzker announces itself in the earliest group of photographs in his retrospective now at the Getty Museum. The pictures were made in downtown Chicago between 1956 and 1959, while Metzker was a graduate student at the Institute of Design (ID), the famed Bauhaus-inspired school that opened in 1937 under the direction of László Moholy-Nagy. One was shot at asphalt level, focused sharply on what looks like a scrap of abandoned cardboard.

When the Soviet government sold hundreds of paintings from the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad in the 1930s, including masterpieces by Rembrandt, Raphael and Velazquez, they ended up working closely with one American art gallery: Knoedler & Company in New York. The gallery abruptly closed last year after more than 160 years in business. Now the Getty Research Institute is acquiring for an undisclosed sum the sales books documenting the Hermitage deals, among other resources that make up Knoedler's vast private archives.

With its promise of destruction and chaos, of the mighty brought low, "The Last Days of Pompeii" is such an irresistible cinematic title it's been used time and time again. Two of the resulting films can be enjoyed in ideal surroundings in the Getty Villa's Outdoor Classical Theater this weekend in a miniseries accompanying the museum's engaging exhibition on the same subject. Playing Friday at 7:30 p.m. is the 1913 Italian silent directed by Mario Caserini and released in this country with a poster proclaiming it "A Spectacular Photo-Drama.