Il Gobbo dei Carracci

Arthur Pond

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The painter, art dealer and etcher Arthur Pond created this print in 1736, probably as a series of twenty-five completed in 1742. The title "Il Gobbo dei Carracci" (the Carracci's humpback) comes from an inscription on the related drawing, now in the Robert Lehman Collection at the Met (1975.1.316). It refers to Pietro Paolo Bonzi, a painter in the circle of the Carracci who specialized in landscapes and still-lives. On the basis of an inscription on the drawing, Pond thought Annibale Carracci to have made the original, but more recent scholarship notes that the compact linear contours and precise shading indicate a seventeenth-century Tuscan artist whose precise identity remains to be established.

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