The Giralda, Seville

David Roberts

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Roberts created this moody image of a Seville landmark while visiting the city in 1833. Built as a minaret by the Moors, the structure became the cathedral bell tower after Christians retook the city in 1248, and the name derives from the crowning weathervane, or giraldillo. Using watercolor over graphite, the artist added touches of white to suggest sunlight dancing off masonry. In this view from the north, the artist makes the top and bottom of the façade equal in width—the resulting lack of vertical recession allowed accurately rendered surface ornament. Studying monuments of Islamic architecture in Spain may have encouraged Roberts’s trip to Egypt and the Holy Land in 1838.

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