Portrait of Niccolò Paganini

Luigi Calamatta

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A long-time collaborator and friend of Ingres, Calamatta reproduced several of the artist’s compositions in elaborate burin engravings. In this case, Ingres supplied Calamatta with a traced and reversed drawing of Niccolò Paganini (43.85.10) to serve as a template for engraving his copper plate in the same direction. With expert precision, Calamatta used a burin to describe Paganini’s facial features and spiral his hair in intricate curls. In contrast, the sketchy appearance of the lower body is achieved with roulettes, engraving tools with small, spiked wheels, which are rolled over the metal plate to produce minutely stippled outlines. Once printed, these lines successfully imitate the modulated tone and texture of graphite. Calamatta used this technique of crayon-manner engraving to capture the spontaneity of Ingres’s original drawing.

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