Studies of a Fallen Male Nude for "Hercules and the Horses of Diomedes"

Eugène Delacroix

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This drawing attests to an unrealized idea for an 1852 commission: the decoration of the Salon de la Paix in the newly expanded Hôtel de Ville (Paris City Hall). Delacroix’s program included eleven lunettes dedicated to episodes from the life of the Greek hero Hercules. Although conceived as a liberating act, Hercules feeding the barbaric king Diomedes to his own flesh-eating horses—the subject partially depicted here—was likely deemed too violent for a room dedicated to peace. The studies of Diomedes reaching backward above his head and Hercules’s fist clamped around the king’s arm convey some of the force of the struggle, even in the absence of Hercules’s body and the threatening horses.

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