Avarice (Avaritia) from the series The Seven Deadly Sins
Pieter van der Heyden
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
Representing the vice of greed, this image belongs to a series of prints of the Seven Deadly Sins, engraved by Pieter van der Heyden after drawings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The personification of greed, a fashionably dressed woman, sits in the central foreground blithely gathering coins in her lap, while a poisonous toad lurks directly in front of her. The various examples of greedy behavior and its unfortunate consequences, in evidence in the surrounding landscape, effectively demonstrate the message of the inscription below: "Scraping Avarice sees neither honor nor courtesy, shame nor divine admonition." Each of the seven prints follows a similar compositional scheme, with the personification of the vice accompanied by a symbolic animal in the foreground. Bruegel also adopted a common setting and "look" for the series by depicting each scene in the style of Hieronymus Bosch, to whom Bruegel was often compared. Greed features an assortment of fantastic creatures and a disjointed arrangement of hybrid architectural structures reminiscent of Bosch's work. This reminiscent style, employed consciously by Bruegel, contrasts sharply with the way he depicted the Seven Virtues, a series of prints executed in the following years—all of them set in an accurate version of Bruegel's contemporary world.
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.