Iphigenia

Karl August Kräutle

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This print was made to mark the acquisition of the related painting by Feuerbach by the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart in 1872. Greek legend records how the goddess Artemis saved the princess Iphigenia from sacrificial death at the hands of her father Agamemnon, then transported her to the island of Taurus to become a priestess. The leading German neoclassical painter imagined Iphigenia's sadness and isolation, and posed his model Lucia Brunacci to echo an ancient statue, "searching for the land of the Greeks with her very soul."

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