The great pantheon of love

José Guadalupe Posada

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

From the 1880s Posada made prints of calaveras (skeletons) that he circulated through broadsheets. They depict skeletons dancing, playing instruments, and illustrating rhyming ballads (corridos) and stories about love affairs printed on brightly colored paper to be sold by street vendors in markets, on the street, and at festivals. They were designed as a vehicle for telling stories to the masses. This print addresses themes of love and romance. Each of the twelve compartments contains an image and a short verse on a romantic subject such as a lovers’ tiff.

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