La Perspective

Salomon de Caus

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Salomon de Caus (1576–1626) was a unique figure in garden history. Trained as an architect-mathematician and hydraulic engineer, he was renowned not only for his garden designs with magnificent waterworks, but also for his many publications on topics relating to the arts and sciences. His most influential works include the Hortus Palatinus (1620) on his Heidelberg garden designs, and Les raisons des forces mouvantes (1615), setting out the principles of hydraulics on which the automata or trick fountains and water jokes in the seventeenth-century garden were based. Familiar with the waterworks in Italian Renaissance gardens (Villa d'Este, Tivoli, and Pratolino, Florence), ultimately derived from the just reissued works of Hero of Alexandria (first century A.D.), de Caus introduced hydraulics into the Northern European garden. His influence was widespread at the courts of the Southern and Northern Netherlands, Germany, and also England, where his younger brother Isaac de Caus worked.

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