Danaë in the Brazen Chamber

Frederick Augustus Sandys

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

When an oracle warned the king of Argos that he would be killed by a grandson, the king locked his childless daughter Danaë in a bronze tower. Artists typically depict Zeus arriving to make love to the girl as a shower of gold, but Sandys imagined an earlier moment in the myth. Dreams of the god have disturbed the princess and caused her to weave his image in a tapestry. Standing in languorous frustration between the textile and her rumpled bed, Danaë raises an arm as if to summon her divine lover. Sandys was influenced by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, admired the prints of Albrecht Dürer, and mastered the inherent linearity of wood engraving. This design was prepared for the journal Once a Week in 1867 but rejected by the editor as too explicit; it was not published until 1888.

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