A Small Town on the Crest of a Slope

Fra Bartolomeo (Bartolomeo di Paolo del Fattorino)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A leading painter in early sixteenth-century Florence, Fra Bartolomeo was also a gifted and prolific draftsman. Among the vast number of surviving drawings by his hand is a remarkable group of independent landscape studies produced at a time when works of this genre were still uncommon. Achieved with clean strokes of the pen and considerable freedom and economy of line, the rural townscape gives the impression of having been observed from nature. Indeed, the artist frequently traveled the Tuscan countryside to sketch in the open air. Yet the sheet is not purely a study after life: certain details, such as the tall tower at right, closely recall an engraving by Albrecht Dürer, while the trees in the foreground are contrived as a frame for the scene beyond. Fra Bartolomeo adapted this composition for the background of a painting of the Nativity (Art Institute of Chicago).

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