Wild Boar Hunt with Spears, from Hunting Scenes in Ornamental Frames

Wild Boar Hunt with Spears, from Hunting Scenes in Ornamental Frames

Jan van der Straet, called Stradanus

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This engraving of a wild boar hunt is based on one of a series of six tapestry designs that Stradanus made for the Florentine Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici’s villa in Poggio a Caiano. In addition to this series, Stradanus made enough cartoons, or full-scale preparatory drawings, to decorate twenty rooms in the villa. Hunting boar was an activity limited to the aristocracy, and here we see the members of Cosimo’s court mounted on horseback, assisted by various servants on foot. A second engraving from the series shows the hunters catching the boars in nets.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Wild Boar Hunt with Spears, from Hunting Scenes in Ornamental FramesWild Boar Hunt with Spears, from Hunting Scenes in Ornamental FramesWild Boar Hunt with Spears, from Hunting Scenes in Ornamental FramesWild Boar Hunt with Spears, from Hunting Scenes in Ornamental FramesWild Boar Hunt with Spears, from Hunting Scenes in Ornamental Frames

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.