Lucretia

Lucas van Leyden

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

During the early years of the sixteenth century Lucas van Leyden was the most important Northern Netherlandish artist and the only printmaker of great significance. In the seventeenth century, printmakers like Hendrick Goltzius and Rembrandt considered him their most significant Dutch artistic predecessor, often looking to his work for technical and compositional source material. Lucas was among the earliest of the Netherlandish Renaissance artists to take inspiration from Italian art. This Lucretia was inspired by a similarly posed Venus engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi after a design by Raphael. Lucas’s contemporary Jan Gossart looked to this print for his own painting of Venus and Cupid of 1521 (Brussels, Musée Royaux de Belgique). Lucretia’s electric hair creates a lively aura around her figure.

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