Fall of the Giants, Jupiter in the clouds overhead striking the Giants with lightning

Fall of the Giants, Jupiter in the clouds overhead striking the Giants with lightning

Girolamo Fagiuoli

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In the mid-sixteenth century, the story of Jupiter overcoming the Giants' uprising was often associated with the victories of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (r. 1519–56) over the Protestant rebellion. Such was the case with the vault painted in about 1533 by Perino del Vaga (Pietro Buonaccorsi) in a chamber that served as a temporary throne room for the emperor in Andrea Doria's Genoese palace. This engraving records one of the preliminary drawings for the fresco. Perino follows Ovid's account in showing Jupiter fighting the Giants without help from the other Olympians, yet includes the boulders and uprooted trees mentioned by Apollodorus (Library 1.6) as weapons of the Giants.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Fall of the Giants, Jupiter in the clouds overhead striking the Giants with lightningFall of the Giants, Jupiter in the clouds overhead striking the Giants with lightningFall of the Giants, Jupiter in the clouds overhead striking the Giants with lightningFall of the Giants, Jupiter in the clouds overhead striking the Giants with lightningFall of the Giants, Jupiter in the clouds overhead striking the Giants with lightning

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.