A woman attacking a sleeping man; page 87 from the "Images of Spain" Album (F)

Goya (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Here, a woman raises an ax to behead a supine peasant, who is perhaps resting from work in the fields. We cannot determine the reason for the attack, but the blankly determined face of the aggressor—who roughly evokes Death carrying a scythe—might signal retribution. The drawing manifests Goya’s unique ability to suggest sequence by indirectly condensing time. While omitting the culminating moment of the blade’s impact, he alludes to it: the logs parallel to the man’s body evoke the act of chopping, and the cloud of dust raised by the woman’s abrupt movement conjures the effect of blood spurting.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art