Fury personified as an emaciated man astride a monster, holding a skull in his raised left hand

Fury personified as an emaciated man astride a monster, holding a skull in his raised left hand

Giovanni Jacopo Caraglio

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

One of Caraglio’s most successful collaborations in Rome in the 1520s was with the Florentine artist Rosso Fiorentino. Rosso spent most of his time in Rome creating designs for prints that were commissioned by the art dealer and publisher Il Baviera (Baviera Carocci da Parma, Italian, active ca. 1515–30). The publisher seems to have been an entrepreneur in commissioning print series, and Rosso and Caraglio worked together on his series of Gods in Niches, The Labors of Hercules, and The Loves of the Gods. Caraglio also translated some individual compositions by Rosso into prints, including Fury. The unconventional image signals Rosso’s expressive nature and the fact that, as an artist, he was not strictly “in pursuit of beauty.” Caraglio’s sharp tonality fits the gloominess of the subject and the composition originally created by the Florentine.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Fury personified as an emaciated man astride a monster, holding a skull in his raised left handFury personified as an emaciated man astride a monster, holding a skull in his raised left handFury personified as an emaciated man astride a monster, holding a skull in his raised left handFury personified as an emaciated man astride a monster, holding a skull in his raised left handFury personified as an emaciated man astride a monster, holding a skull in his raised left hand

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.