De Arithmetica

Filippo Calandri

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This is one of the first inexpensive illustrated textbooks making it available to many more students than earlier teaching materials, which had been written by hand on vellum. The small size and the many diagrams made it easier to use, while the pictures must have made math more bearable to young students. The woodcuts, which range from ornamental classicizing borders framing multiplication tables to lively depictions of people and animals that illustrate word problems, are exquisite examples of the flowering of Florentine woodcut illustration in the 1490s. On this page, we see a series of hand gestures that signify numbers.

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