Portrait of Bartholomeus Spranger
Jan Muller
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
Jan Muller was one of the most sought-after Mannerist printmakers at the end of the sixteenth century. The son of an Amsterdam printer, printmaker, and publisher, he developed a style modeled on that of Hendrick Goltzius, the premier draftsman and printmaker in the northern Netherlands. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, he began to engrave portraits. Most were of important political figures, reproducing painted portraits by various artists, but a few were of artists and musicians. Among the latter is the Portrait of Bartholomeus Spranger, one of the most important northern Mannerist artists and the court painter to the Emperor Rudolf II of Prague. Muller engraved a dozen prints after Spranger’s designs, but the model for the present work was a lost portrait by Hans van Aachen, a German painter who also worked for Rudolf. Muller added an elaborate architectural frame decorated with symbolic references to Spranger’s virtues, including the garlanded helmet above the oval and the putto at the left with the shield and lance referring to Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom and patron of the arts, and the trumpets held by the putto on the right announcing the artist’s fame. Below, supporting the pedestal are images of two urns with burning candles, again referring to the artist’s wisdom.
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.