A man wearing a mask drinking a cup of coffee (Le Masque au Caffé), title page to "Divers Portraits"

Giovanni David

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Most of Giovanni David's etchings that were published by his Genoese patron in Venice are infused with the sophistication and theatricality that characterized the city's culture in the eighteenth century. This print is the frontispiece to a series of twelve prints, the 'Divers Portraits'. All of the types shown are characteristic of Venice and its environs. Inscribed with French poems on society's customs and morals drawn from the works of the French satirist Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux. Here, we see a masked reveler taking refreshment in one of the coffeehouses first introduced in the eighteenth century. The series is dedicated to Domenico Corvi, David's teacher in Rome.

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