Lucretia instructing her daughters in needlework from Giovanni Ostaus's, La vera perfettione del disegno di varie sorte di recami (Venice, 1557)

Lucretia instructing her daughters in needlework from Giovanni Ostaus's, La vera perfettione del disegno di varie sorte di recami (Venice, 1557)

Giuseppe Salviati (Giuseppe Porta, called Il Salviati)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

An argument among the generals of the Roman tyrant Tarquin about whose wife was the most chaste resulted in a surprise visit to Rome, where the men discovered that their women were up to no good. Only the beautiful Lucretia, wife of Collatinus, was found virtuously engaged in needlework. In the background of this woodcut, we see Collatinus with the king's son, who conceived a passion for Lucretia that led to her rape and subsequent suicide. When her kinsmen, seeking vengeance, drove Tarquin from Rome, the Roman republic was founded. Giuseppe Salviati painted a fresco of the same subject on the façade of the Palazzo Loredan in Venice. This woodcut is cut from the second page of what appears to be the first edition of the lacebook by Giovanni Ostaus, La vera perfettione del disegno di varie sorte di recami, Venice, 1557.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Lucretia instructing her daughters in needlework from Giovanni Ostaus's, La vera perfettione del disegno di varie sorte di recami (Venice, 1557)Lucretia instructing her daughters in needlework from Giovanni Ostaus's, La vera perfettione del disegno di varie sorte di recami (Venice, 1557)Lucretia instructing her daughters in needlework from Giovanni Ostaus's, La vera perfettione del disegno di varie sorte di recami (Venice, 1557)Lucretia instructing her daughters in needlework from Giovanni Ostaus's, La vera perfettione del disegno di varie sorte di recami (Venice, 1557)Lucretia instructing her daughters in needlework from Giovanni Ostaus's, La vera perfettione del disegno di varie sorte di recami (Venice, 1557)

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.