Romeo and Juliet at the Masquerade (Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene 5)
Francesco Bartolozzi
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
Romeo and Juliet meet at a masked party given by her family, the Capulets. Based on a drawing by Hamilton, Bartolozzi's print shows Romeo dressed as a pilgrim, to echo the playful language of Shakespeare's text. Juliet's nurse, at right, is apprehensive about this intrusion by a Montague into the domain of their declared enemies, the Capulets.
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.