The Great Lansquenet or Standard Bearer

Prince Rupert of the Rhine

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Prince Rupert of the Rhine (son of the exiled Frederick V of Bohemia) was one of the earliest practitioners of mezzotint, and a vital contributor to its development. Rupert met Ludwig von Siegen (the technique's inventor) in 1654, but did not attempt his own mezzotints until 1657. He made this impressive print the following year. He began by roughening his plate with a serrated-edged hatcher (a prototype of the modern mezzotint "rocker") to make the parallel shading lines at the upper left of the sheet, and the toothed wheel of a roulette (apparently attached to a pivoted pole) to form the dotlike texture of the man's skin. Next, he sliced away the metal burr with a sharp-edged scraper, and polished it with a smooth-tipped burnisher to retrieve the highlights of the white paper. Finally, he added etched lines to form the feather in the youth's cap, and the edges of his slashed-silk sleeves. Interestingly, in the original painting (attributed to Giorgione in the seventeenth century), the sleeves are made of chain mail.

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