The Apostle Saint James

Anton Maria Zanetti the Elder

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Zanetti has here described the pose and drapery of Saint James through layers of colored ink, avoiding printmakers’ traditional reliance on outlines and linear shading. The artist employed a technique known as chiaroscuro woodcut, in which he formed an image by successively printing three woodblocks, each in its own color. He reserved passages of bare paper in order to create the bright highlights seen on the figure’s right arm and shoulder, which contrast with the shadows around his legs and backside. Due to the difficulty of printing chiaroscuro woodcuts, Zanetti was one of only a few eighteenth-century printmakers to practice the technique.

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