The Academy of Baccio Bandinelli

Enea Vico

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Baccio Bandinelli (1493–1560), a Florentine sculptor and life-long rival of Michelangelo, commissioned this engraving from the printmaker Enea Vico (1523–1567) to celebrate his achievements and pretensions as a teacher and man of learning. Vico conceived the artist's workshop not as it must have looked, but rather as a gentlemanly room peopled with industrious assistants in fashionable dress. Bandinelli himself appears at the extreme right in a garment adorned with a badge of knighthood, a sign of the rank he had received from Charles V. By equipping the studio with books and antiquities, Vico presents the making of art as an intellectual enterprise, and by naming the studio an 'academy', he associates it with Plato's famous school. The foreground is strewn with classical statuary and human bones appropriate for anatomical study. Brilliant lamplight and flickering firelight cast evocative shadows and illuminate the figures bent over their work. Some of their poses and groupings are reminiscent of Raphael's famous fresco 'The School of Athens', an analogy that further exalts the character of Bandinelli's enterprise.

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