The Farnese Hercules

Giovanni Pichler

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Pichler family was an Austrian dynasty of glyptic artists based in Rome. Giovanni’s cameo quotes a famous ancient marble statue in the Museo Archeologico, Naples. Another after it, also signed by Pichler, is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Nathaniel Marchant (see 40.20.1) began to use the same two-thirds viewpoint by at least 1780 in intaglios (now in the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, and elsewhere) that circulated in the form of sulfur impressions. Whether he or Pichler was the first to do so remains to be discovered.

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The fifty thousand objects in the Museum's comprehensive and historically important collection of European sculpture and decorative arts reflect the development of a number of art forms in Western European countries from the early fifteenth through the early twentieth century. The holdings include sculpture in many sizes and media, woodwork and furniture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and jewelry, horological and mathematical instruments, and tapestries and textiles. Ceramics made in Asia for export to European markets and sculpture and decorative arts produced in Latin America during this period are also included among these works.

Metropolitan Museum of Art