Young Boy, Member of the Family of Pio di Savoia, Counts of Carpi

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Museum’s collection of Renaissance and Baroque medals and plaquettes is a resource that has quietly grown apace without attracting much notice. Conceived for the delectation of individual owners, small reliefs of this sort have by their nature remained a classic preserve of connoisseurs. Over the years it has been donors fare more than any curator, however knowledgeable or farsighted, who have brought the necessary concentration or variety or depth to our holdings. Accordingly, the gift of seventy-one objects assembled by the late Erich Lederer of Geneva and presented by his widow will prove to be a significant milestone. Mr. Lederer, then living in Vienna, started to collect in the 1920s; his activity spanned half a century. The pride of the collection is the Italian Renaissance plaquettes, most of them published in a catalogue by Charles Avery for Christie’s in 1985. On this object, the absence of an inscription around the rim indicates that this is a trial cast of an unfinished model.

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