Arch of Honor

Arch of Honor

Albrecht Dürer

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Arch of Honor is the artistic summation of Emperor Maximilian I’s ambitions. Combining elements from many of his other commissions, it shows his ancestry, territories, extended kinship, predecessors as emperor, deeds, accomplishments, personal talents, and interests. Among Maximilian’s many ambitious printed projects, the Arch of Honor is the only one that was completed and published during his lifetime. The full visual and textual monument comprises 36 sheets of large folio paper printed from 195 woodblocks

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.