Ornamental Panel

Agostino Veneziano (Agostino dei Musi)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In the 1480s, artists discovered an ancient style of wall painting at Emperor Nero’s Domus Aurea, which had been buried underneath Rome’s Oppian Hill. They were called grotesques, or grotteschi, due to their subterranean, grottolike location. Raphael and Giovanni da Udine famously adapted the fantastical figures, bands of foliage, and stalklike candelabra in their fresco decorations for the Vatican Palace, combining this imagery with motifs derived from ancient sculpture and figures from classical myths. Veneziano, a printmaker working in the circle of Marcantonio Raimondi in Rome, engraved prints after these works. Due to prolific, business-minded printmakers like Veneziano, designs based on the Vatican grotesques rapidly spread throughout Europe and served as sources of inspiration for other artists.

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