Minerva

Jan Muller

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This striking, unfinished engraving of Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom, was only attributed to Jan Muller relatively recently. It belongs to a group of large-scale engravings after Bartolomeus Spranger, the court painter to Rudolf II, that Muller made between 1597 and 1606. While the figure is largely completed, the hatching of the drapery at the lower right stops abruptly. There are also large blank areas in the background and a rapidly sketched oval in the upper left corner, all of which suggests that this might be a work in progress, and Muller is famous for the large number of incomplete proof impressions that he printed during his lifetime. However, in contrast to those proofs, there are no "finished" impressions of this print recorded. The print was previously considered to be the work of Aegidius Sadler or Jacob Matham.

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