Diana and Actaeon

Georg Pecham

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This drawing depicts the ancient Greco-Roman myth in which the hunter Actaeon stumbles upon the goddess Diana’s secret grove and sees her bathing with her nymphs. In anger, Diana transforms the mortal man into a stag so that he will be killed by his own hunting dogs. Pecham situates the characters amidst overgrown ruins, concentrating his attention on the way light filters through the tall, leafy trees and casts delicate shadows on the figures’ fleshy bodies.

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