The Rape of the Sabines

Andrea Andreani

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Executed in three sections on six sheets of paper, this monumental woodcut depicts the ancient legend of the abduction of the Sabine women by the men of Rome. Upon finding the city bereft of women, Rome’s founder, Romulus, invited the neighboring peoples to a festival as a pretense to the abduction. Each Roman youth carried off an unmarried woman from the Sabine contingent as his bride. When the Sabines later attacked Rome, the women ran onto the battlefield and secured peace between their fathers and husbands. Andreani, who was alone in reviving the technique of the chiaroscuro print at the end of the sixteenth century, created a number of ambitious works. This spectacular woodcut reproduces, to scale but with slight adjustments, the plaque that was intended to clarify the subject of Giambologna's celebrated marble group in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence which had been unveiled in Florence in 1583 to public acclaim.

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