A Fountain in a Grotto

Giovanni Guerra

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

During the 16th century, Italian nobles developed a taste for artificial grottoes in their gardens and sometimes even in their houses. Artists, such as Giambologna and Bernardo Buontalenti became very skilled in inventing landscapes of rocks and shells often inhabited by amphibians, invertebrates and other animals. The aquatic nature of most of these grottoes also lent itself well to the inclusion of fountains and statues of deities connected to water. In this design by Giovanni Guerra, a river god is seated on the rocks. He supports two amphorae from which water falls into the basin below.

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