Francesco I d'Este Invites Foreign Scholars to Court, from "L'Idea di un Principe ed Eroe Cristiano in Francesco I d'Este, di Modena e Reggio Duca VIII [...]"

Bartolomeo Fenice (Fénis)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This print is from L'Idea di un Principe ed Eroe Cristiano in Francesco I d'Este, di Modena e Reggio Duca VIII [...] collected in an album of brown boards. Four prints are hinged on each page of the album with a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century inscription pasted beneath the print on the album page. The prints are etched in the manner of Callot and illustrate Francesco I d'Este's virtuous nature as a ruler in battle, in religious matters, and in daily life. Three of the prints are signed by Jean Sauvé, who presumably worked with Fenice on the execution of the illustrations for this book. There are sixty-seven copper plates and forty-five preparatory drawings in the Museo Civico di Modena.

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.