Saint Thomas

Anonymous, German, 18th century

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, devotional images composed of cut and reassembled prints elaborately adorned with paint, fabric, and other materials found a ready market throughout Catholic Europe. Vividly colored and multitextured, these works stimulated spiritual devotion through their alluring optical and tactile qualities. Long thought to be the products of amateur practitioners, devotional assemblages were more often professionally made, with dedicated industries concentrated in Antwerp and Southern Germany. These works belong to a well-established practice of altering, combining, and repurposing printed images, and they exhibit a sophisticated handling of materials.

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