Design for a Festival Float or Barge

Perino del Vaga (Pietro Buonaccorsi)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Another study with some variations for this elaborate decorative construction, which may well have been intended for a festival float, is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes (inv. C 65.1). Both drawings in New York and Rennes bear a traditional attribution to Polidoro da Caravaggio, but Bernice Davidson pointed out that they are the work of some close follower of Perino del Vaga. According to Florian Härb and Marzia Faietti (see here Bibliography), the Metropolitan Museum of Art drawing could be an early work by the Bolognese painter and prolific drafstman Prospero Fontana (1512-1597) who, after a short period spent with Innocenzo da Imola, joined the Roman workshop of Perino del Vega at just sixteen years of age. (F.R., 2014)

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