Otto, Count of Nassau and his Wife Adelheid van Vianen

Otto, Count of Nassau and his Wife Adelheid van Vianen

Bernard van Orley

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

At the end of the 1520s, Henry III of Nassau, advisor to Emperor Charles V, commissioned eight tapestry designs from the Brussels master Bernard van Orley glorifying his ancestors in the house of Orange-Nassau. The tapestries were woven by Willem de Moyen in Brussels, but were probably destroyed in a fire in 1760, and this and six other drawings are the only record of the commission. Discovered only shortly before the Museum acquired it in 1995, this drawing depicts one of Henry's fourteenth-century ancestors, Count Otto II of Nassau and his wife Adelheid van Vianden, seated on horseback, splendidly dressed, against the backdrop of an elaborate landscape. Their coats of arms, a festoon, and a cartouche mentioning their names top the composition, but the tapestry would also have had an ornamental border all around the composition. The contrast between the figures and their carefully observed horses in the foreground, and the deeply receding landscape is characteristic of van Orley's new approach to tapestry, which differs markedly from the more two-dimensional designs of earlier Northern artists.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Otto, Count of Nassau and his Wife Adelheid van VianenOtto, Count of Nassau and his Wife Adelheid van VianenOtto, Count of Nassau and his Wife Adelheid van VianenOtto, Count of Nassau and his Wife Adelheid van VianenOtto, Count of Nassau and his Wife Adelheid van Vianen

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.