Apollo and the Muses on Parnassus

Raphael Morghen

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

One of the most significant commissions of the eighteenth century was the Parnassus painted by Mengs in 1761 for the Villa Albani, Rome, and hailed as a manifesto of the new style of Neoclassicism. The carefully differentiated Muses, accompanied by their mother, Mnemosyne, derive from ancient sculpture, while the setting, a small grove of laurels in which the Muses are grouped around their leader, harks back to Raphael's fresco in the Vatican. Morghen was one of the most admired of the technically accomplished printmakers whose reproductions of famous paintings were enormously prized at the end of the eighteenth century.

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