Roman Soldiers Defending a City Plagued by Famine

Roman Soldiers Defending a City Plagued by Famine

Louis Fabritius Dubourg

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This large, signed and dated drawing by a founding member of the Amsterdam Academy depicts adults, children, and dogs struggling for food and drink, while various men haul large bags and vessels through the crowd. Armored soldiers try to prevent other figures from entering through the open city gate, beyond which a camp is visible. At right are two priestly figures, one with hands clasped in prayer, the other looking upward. The classical dress suggests an episode drawn from ancient or biblical history. Several elements bring to mind the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 CE. According to some accounts, Roman civilians, in a desperate effort to find food, opened the Salarian Gate, thus enabling the Visigoths to enter the city and pillage it. The woman and child on the ground in the foreground are quotations of Raphael’s Massacre of the Innocents, which was widely known through a print by Marcantonio Raimondi (see22.67.21) and Poussin’s Rape of the Sabine Women, which was in a Dutch collection in 1722 (see 46.160). (JSS, 8/23/2018)

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Roman Soldiers Defending a City Plagued by FamineRoman Soldiers Defending a City Plagued by FamineRoman Soldiers Defending a City Plagued by FamineRoman Soldiers Defending a City Plagued by FamineRoman Soldiers Defending a City Plagued by Famine

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.