Landscape (Wooded Approach to a Town)

Fra Bartolomeo (Bartolomeo di Paolo del Fattorino)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Dated about 1508, this drawing can be considered among the earliest pure landscape studies in European art. Confining himself to the use of pen and ink, Fra Bartolomeo employed a great variety of strokes, from dots to dashes to hatches, in order to convey the textures and details of the Tuscan landscape. Fra Bartolomeo also used the void of the paper to great effect in expressing the expansiveness of his subject. Like other similar landscape studies by him, this sheet appears to have been drawn directly from nature. A few such drawings were used in the backgrounds of paintings. This drawing is one of a group kept until recently in an album compiled about 1730 by the Florentine art historian Niccolò Gabburri (1675–1742) which included landscape studies now in the Museum's collection (nos. 1975.1.270 and 57.65).

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