Head of a Woman

Anonymous, Bohemian, 15th century

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The refinement of the International Gothic Style and the flowering of the visual arts in Prague at the court of Emperor Charles IV and his successors are both apparent in this sheet, which is among the few drawings of this period to have survived. Most of these drawings are likely to have once been part of pattern books, which artists kept in their workshops to provide them with models for paintings and illuminations. This drawing, one of the most outstanding of its kind and apparently unique in its use of color, probably served as a model for representations of the Virgin. Its style has been linked to a sheet (now in the Cleveland Museum of Art) from the so-called Seitenstetten Antiphonary, made for a Bohemian monastery about 1405, and it can be attributed to an artist active in the workshop that produced that manuscript. Its importance as a relatively precisely attributed early fifteenth-century drawing is matched by its exquisite beauty.

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