Design for a Cartouche and Representation of 'Smell', Plate 5 from 'Neu Inventierte auf die artigste Facon Sehr nutzliche Schild.'

Design for a Cartouche and Representation of 'Smell', Plate 5 from 'Neu Inventierte auf die artigste Facon Sehr nutzliche Schild.'

Johann Georg Pintz

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Ornament print with a design for a rocaille cartouche, with a depiction of two figures kneeling in front of an altar (likely the mythological story of Iphis and Ianthe praying to Isis) in the central compartment, to illustrate the sense of 'smell'. This print is bound in an album containing 27 series with a total of 122 ornament prints from the fund of the prominent Augsburg publisher Martin Engelbrecht.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Design for a Cartouche and Representation of 'Smell', Plate 5 from 'Neu Inventierte auf die artigste Facon Sehr nutzliche Schild.'Design for a Cartouche and Representation of 'Smell', Plate 5 from 'Neu Inventierte auf die artigste Facon Sehr nutzliche Schild.'Design for a Cartouche and Representation of 'Smell', Plate 5 from 'Neu Inventierte auf die artigste Facon Sehr nutzliche Schild.'Design for a Cartouche and Representation of 'Smell', Plate 5 from 'Neu Inventierte auf die artigste Facon Sehr nutzliche Schild.'Design for a Cartouche and Representation of 'Smell', Plate 5 from 'Neu Inventierte auf die artigste Facon Sehr nutzliche Schild.'

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.