Bust of a Man

Wolfgang Huber

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This expressive drawing by Wolfgang Huber, one of the greatest painters of the Danube school, is part of a group of nine head studies in the same medium and technique, all initialed and dated 1522. These sheets offer penetrating essays on physiognomy, obscuring the boundaries between observation and imagination, and may have evolved from Huber's study of Leonardo's work. The drawing exhibited here was preparatory for the head of a young Roman soldier in the left background of the "Raising of the Cross" (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), a composition densely packed with the faces of onlookers of richly varied characterization. In the drawing, the slightly foreshortened, three-quarter view of the young man's head accentuates the heroic anxiety of his features. Huber's bold use of the drawing medium—chalk and wash—differs significantly from that of his other drawings and that of his northern contemporaries. It may have been a response to contemporary north Italian techniques.

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