Portrait of Dante Alighieri

Jan van der Straet, called Stradanus

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Engraving celebrating Dante. The central roundel includes a large portrait of the poet. A smaller roundel above includes a portrait of Beatrice and a smaller roundel below represents a double portrait of Virgil and Statius. Portraits surrounded by four diagrams in each corner representing Paradise, the Heavens, Jerusalem with Limbo and Hell as well as the Terrestrial Paradise. The inscription at the base of the image boasts of Dante's Florentine origins and his work and dedicates the image to Luigi Alamanni.

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