The Raising of Lazarus

The Raising of Lazarus

Jan Muller

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The miraculous story of the resurrection of Lazarus, which takes place shortly before the Last Supper, is recorded in the Gospel of John, chapter 11. Jesus travels to Bethany to visit Lazarus, his friend who is very ill but unfortunately arrives too late; Lazarus died four days previously. Lazarus’s sisters, Martha and Mary, are devastated, but Christ tells Martha that if she has faith, he will bring her brother back to life. In Muller’s engraving, Christ stands in the middle of a crowd, quietly raising his arm in a gesture of both blessing and power, calling Lazarus back from the grave. The astonished witnesses, in contrast, gesticulate dramatically around him. Among them are the sisters — one kneels on the ground, her arms outstretched to her brother, while the other looks up devotedly toward Jesus. Muller uses long lines of dense hatching, interspersed with the blank area of the paper to create a flickering surface against the dark background, enhancing the dramatic effect of the scene. Jan Muller was one of the most sought-after Mannerist printmakers, engraving compositions of the leading artists of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In the mid- to late 1590s and early 1600s, he made a handful of spectacular night scenes, including the Last Supper after Gillis Coignet (2018.839.109), the Dead Christ Lamented by an Angel after Jacopo Ligozzi (61.658.11), two original designs by Muller, Belshazzar’s Feast (51.501.6341) and The Adoration of the Magi (51.501.6340 and 67.810.2), and the present work. It is Muller’s only engraving after Abraham Bloemaert, the prolific painter and draftsman, and is based on a drawing now in the Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig (inv. no. N.I.392).

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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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.