Ganymede as a young boy riding a large eagle (Zeus) in flight above a landscape

Ganymede as a young boy riding a large eagle (Zeus) in flight above a landscape

Giulio Campagnola

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The extreme youth of the boy depicted by Campagnola, together with his willing participation in his abduction by Jupiter in the guise of an eagle, suggests that a Neoplatonic reading of the myth may be intended. Beginning with the moralized versions of the Metamorphoses in the fourteenth century, the ravishment came to be interpreted as the union of the soul with God. The engraving may have been based on a pen study in the collection of Andrede Hanesy, Paris, probably by Mantegna (see The Illustrated Bartsch XXV.2518.372). The landscape is copied from Albrecht Durer's engraving 'Virgin and Child with a Monkey' (c.1498).

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Ganymede as a young boy riding a large eagle (Zeus) in flight above a landscapeGanymede as a young boy riding a large eagle (Zeus) in flight above a landscapeGanymede as a young boy riding a large eagle (Zeus) in flight above a landscapeGanymede as a young boy riding a large eagle (Zeus) in flight above a landscapeGanymede as a young boy riding a large eagle (Zeus) in flight above a landscape

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.