The Banquet of Anthony and Cleopatra

Jean Honoré Fragonard

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This etching is from a group of sixteen made by Fragonard in Paris around 1763-64, based on black chalk drawings he had made in Italy a few years earlier for his friend and patron, the abbé de Saint-Non. Of the sixteen, ten were based on Venetian models, including this one after Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (Italian, 1696-1770). To create the compositon, Fragonard merged excerpts from two adjacent frescoes by Tiepolo in the Palazzo Labia, Venice. From Tiepolo's work, he took the scene of the Banquet of Anthony and Cleopatra, but replaced the architectural backdrop with clouds bearing the figural group of Pluto Abducting Persephone which, in the villa, appears on the ceiling above.

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