Fall of the Giants

Bartolomeo Coriolano

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A contemporary biographer of Guido Reni reported that the artist, famed for his depictions of devout saints and beautiful women, created this composition in order to show that he was the equal of any master in depicting the muscular male nude. Reni often worked with the printmaker Coriolano, who produced eighteen chiaroscuro woodcuts after Reni's designs. Reni drew inspiration from Giulio Romano's frescoed room in the Palazzo Te in Mantua, where the viewer is surrounded by images of huge, cartoonlike Giants crushed beneath crumbling mountains and fallen columns.

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