New Inventions of Modern Times [Nova Reperta], The Invention of the Wind Mill, plate 11

Jan Collaert I

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Eleventh plate from a print series entitled Nova Reperta (New Inventions of Modern Times) consisting of a title page and 19 plates, engraved by Jan Collaert I, after Jan van der Straet, called Stradanus, and published by Philips Galle. Illustration of several wind mills in a landscape. A town with its churches is depicted in the background on the right. In the middle ground a woman carries a sack on her back, a man drives a horse-drawn carriage with more sacks, and a man draws a sack down from the top of a wind mill. In the foreground a man carries a sack on horseback, while a woman carries another one on her back.

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.