Veelderhande Niewe Compartimente (Titlepage in Dutch)

Michiel Mosyn

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The painter Gerbrand van den Eeckhout acted as the designer for several print series showing cartouches and decorative art objects in the Auricular Style. This particular series of cartouches was aimed at an international audience and three different title pages were made to accompany the prints. This is the Dutch title page, which is the most elaborate of the three. The title cartouche is held up by two male figures and below the cartouche several attributes lie strewn over the floor which might refer to the disciplines for which the designs were most useful: architecture and sculpture.

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