Four Studies of Recumbent Female Nudes (Galatea)

Carlo Maratti

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Characterized by a striking chromatic contrast between the red chalk and the blue paper, this study was for Maratti’s late painting 'Galatea and Acis,' a mythological subject taken from Ovid’s 'Metamorphoses'. The beautiful Nereid Galatea stretches her hand toward a shell filled with corals and leans into the body of her love one, the shepherd Acis. The statuesque, reclining sea nymph is repeated three times on this large sheet: the artist drew a full study of the figure on the left and emphasized her sinuous outline and sensual pose in the two studies on the right. Currently preserved in the Far Eastern Museum at Khabarovsk (Russia), Maratti’s painting was executed at the end of the artist’s long career, around 1708-13, and just like the present sheet it was formerly treasured in the renowned collection of the Earls of Orford at Houghton Hall.

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