Menelaus and Patroclus, after the Antique (recto and verso)

Henry Fuseli

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Fuseli here shows the Greek king Menelaus mourning a fallen fellow warrior, basing the image on a Roman sculpture preserved in Florence in the Loggia dei Lanzi—the artist visited the city in 1770 on his way to Rome and again on his way north in 1778. During this long Italian sojourn, Fuseli regularly mined history and poetry for dramatic subjects, and devised poses inspired by classical and Renaissance art. Here, he altered his sculptural source to accentuate the tragic death of a young Greek in battle with the Trojan prince Hector—an encounter described in Homer’s "Illiad."

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