A Lion Confronting a Dragon

Anonymous, Italian, Tuscan, 16th century

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

At first glance, this spirited confrontation between a winged dragon and a crouching lion may seem to be a product of the artist’s imagination. Yet the author of the work appears to have borrowed the composition from a well-known Florentine engraving of the 1460s (British Museum, London), which may itself have been modeled on a pattern book of animal poses. Descending from classical mythology and medieval allegory, fantastical creatures captivated Renaissance artists. The motif of the lion and dragon fighting was common in medieval bestiaries, moralizing manuscripts featuring real and fictional beasts. Though the draftsman derived the overall design from the print, he rendered the figures and landscape elements with greater naturalism and detail. The modeling of the forms with dense parallel and cross-hatching to create a sculptural chiaroscuro suggests that this is an early sixteenth-century work.

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