Giotto and Cimabue, from "L'Artiste"

Armand Vastine

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This print represents an extremely popular subject exhibited at the French Salon in the 1840s. The critic Arsène Houssaye, editor-in-chief of "L'Artiste," wrote that each year, one could anticipate a half-dozen pictures of Giotto and Cimabue. The narrative of these works derived from Giorgio Vasari's sixteenth-century account of the meeting of these two masters of the late middle ages. At the 1844 Salon, Houssaye cited four examples, noting that Hennet's, reproduced in this lithograph, was the most distinguished. Hennet was a student of Ingres, who showed regularly at the Salon from 1837–61. Vastine, the lithographer, was a student of Paul Delaroche and also a frequent Salon exhibitor.

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