Studies for a Ceiling (recto and verso)

Michel Corneille the Younger

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This sheet of energetic sketches has been attributed to the French seventeenth-century painter Michel Corneille the Younger, a successful and prolific decorator of royal residences. The artist studied in Italy and trained under Pierre Mignard (French, 1613–1676) and Charles Le Brun (French, 1619–1690). Corneille the Younger was also a practiced printmaker, who was employed by the German banker Everhard Jabach (1618–1695) to engrave the best Italian drawings in his collection. The artist covered the sheet here with a large number of individual sketches, featuring ideas for figural groups, for ornament, and for the overall scheme of a compartmentalized ceiling. Although it is not certain for which building this ceiling design was intended, the ornamental motifs and the crisp style of draftsmanship are thoroughly characteristic of Corneille’s work.

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