Temperance (Temperantia) from The Virtues

Philips Galle

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Bruegel’s design for Temperance depicts a maelstrom of human activity collapsed into an impossible space. Figures crowd the print in clusters of activity that bleed into one another, from choir singers accompanied by a small orchestra to actors performing for a rapt audience to cosmographers futilely attempting to measure a smoke-billowing, swiftly rotating earth. Groups of surveyors occupy the rightmost edge of the image, gauging fortifications and artillery, while in the foreground students furiously read and transcribe texts, and lenders busily settle their accounts. Anything but temperate, the image juxtaposes the central figure—a personification of temperance and the virtue upon which the study of the liberal arts was supposed to be based—with the chaotic reality of human experience.

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