Amorini Celebrate the Rape of Proserpina

Francesco Rosaspina

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Having conquered the sky and the earth, Venus told her son that she wished to extend their dominion to the Underworld. Cupid aimed his sharpest arrow at Pluto, causing him to fall violently in love with Proserpina, who was gathering flowers with her companions (right background) in a land of perpetual spring. Carrying her off in his chariot, Pluto disregarded the pleas of the nymph of the Bay of Cyane (left background) and plunged through the Sicilian bay into his subterranean realm (Metamorphoses 5.363–424). After her daughter's abduction, the distraught Ceres, goddess of the harvest, neglected her duties and the crops failed. To restore the earth's fertility, Jupiter decreed that Proserpina spend part of each year above ground. With her annual return comes the spring. Albani ignored the seasonal implications of the myth in order to focus on Love's triumph. See 23.106.61 for an incomplete proof impression.

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