A View of the Vestibule of Santa Maria Maggiore at Rome

Georges François Blondel

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Georges-François Blondel was the son of a leading French architectural theorist Jacques-François Blondel. After training in Paris, he worked first in Rome and then in London, where he learned the technique of mezzotint engraving. This print depicts a celebrated structure of eighteenth-century Rome, Ferdinando Fuga's dramatic facade of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, completed in 1743. It is one of nine architectural views the artist published between 1765 and 1767. His taste for monumental classical structures and his tendency to make even modern subjects resemble ancient ruins suggest his admiration for Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1788). The fragmented view, small figures, and classical architectural forms which Blondel created similarly give the late Baroque structure the appearance of an ancient ruin. Unusually, Blondel rocked the mezzotint plate twice: first when preparing the ground for the design, and again when scraping the composition, creating haphazard, expressive strokes that animate the sky.

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