Standing Male Figure

Standing Male Figure

Filippino Lippi

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Considered one of the most gifted draftsmen of the Florentine Renaissance, Filippino was the illegitimate son of the Carmelite friar—and famous painter—Fra Filippo Lippi (ca. 1406–1469) and the pupil of Sandro Botticelli (ca. 1445–1510). This drapery study, acquired by the Museum in 1998 as by an anonymous Italian artist, is certainly by the young Filippino, complementing therefore the Museum's other two major drawings by the artist (nos. 36.101.1 and 68.204). Made with a metalpoint on colored prepared paper—a demanding technique that Filippino mastered with ease — the drawing is datable to circa 1475–80 and it shows an abbreviated handling of the draperies and a sculptural conception of the standing figure that are typical of the artist's earliest career. (Carmen C. Bambach, 1998, rev. 2014)

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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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.