The Marriage of the Virgin

Giovanni Jacopo Caraglio

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Early in his career Caraglio seems to have met Parmigianino, an artist who was extremely interested in printmaking himself. The Marriage of the Virgin reproduces a highly finished drawing by Parmigianino that is now in the collection of Chatsworth House in Bakewell, England. Caraglio has followed the model with a staggering level of accuracy. When compared to his earlier engraving of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, Flanked by Saint Roch and Saint Sebastian, we see clearly the ways in which Caraglio altered his style of engraving to capture the dynamic character of Parmigianino’s draftsmanship.

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