Head of a Bearded Man

Domenico Fetti

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Consecutively active in Rome, Mantua, and Venice, Domenico Fetti is best known for his history paintings, but this drawing clearly exemplyfies his virtuosity as a fine portraitist. The intensity of the gaze of this astutely observed sitter recalls Fetti's celebrated painting, the Portrait of an Actor, in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg. The highly controlled pastel technique Fetti is displaying here might have come from his master Lodovico Cigoli or might have been inspired by earlier examples by Federico Barocci and Jacopo Bassano. The attribution to Domenico Fetti goes back to the time of the French collector Pierre-Jean Mariette, whose attribution is elegantly inscribed on his signature-blue mount.

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