Ponte Santa Trinità, Florence

James Duffield Harding

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Ponte Santa Trinità, a bridge across the Arno in Florence, forms the center of Harding's watercolor. The tower of the Palazzo Vecchio punctuates the skyline at left, and the Ponte Vecchio is glimpsed beyond the arches. The artist took his view from the top of a flight of steps leading down to the river, and describes masons working on a block of stone in the foreground. Additional figures sit on or lean against the embankment wall as a figure on horseback passes a carriage further along the riverside road. The images was engraved by James Redaway for Thomas Roscoe's "The Tourist in Italy" (1832).

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