Calligraphic Trompe-l'œil Calendar

Calligraphic Trompe-l'œil Calendar

Matthias Buchinger

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Part of a group of calendars that Buchinger produced early in his career, this spectacular example seeks to trick the eye with its curling pieces of vellum attached to a wall with wax seals and pushpins. The calendar marks each day of December with the celebration of a Christian saint; accents of red ink recall the practice of rubrication, in which medieval scribes would emphasize letters in manuscripts using ink of a similar color. Buchinger is known through his signed pieces to have visited Augsburg, Nuremberg, Zurich, and, because of this drawing, Winterthur in 1709. Along with the Johann Michael Püchler portrait of Martin Luther seen nearby, it was found in a friendship album amassed in the early eighteenth century by Hans Wilpert Zoller in Zurich.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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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.