Holy Family and Two Music-Making Angels

Jan Muller

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Around 1590, Jan Muller began making engravings after designs by Bartholomeus Spranger, the court painter to the Emperor Rudolf II of Prague. Previously Hendrick Goltzius, the foremost Mannerist printmaker and most probably Muller’s teacher, had occupied the unofficial role as Spranger’s engraver, but when the former left the Netherlands to travel in Italy, Muller was the logical successor. The Holy Family with Two Music-Making Angels is Muller’s earliest print after Spranger and one of only two with religious rather than a mythological subjects, which were more typical of the worldly, sophisticated society of Rudolf’s court.

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