Giuseppe Cesare, called Cavaliere d'Arpino, a bust-length portrait in a twelve-sided frame

Giuseppe Cesare, called Cavaliere d'Arpino, a bust-length portrait in a twelve-sided frame

Ottavio Leoni (Il Padovano)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Late in life, from around 1621 until 1630, Leoni made forty striking portraits of famous men, including this depiction of the Roman artist Cavaliere d’Arpino (1568–1640). The frames around Leoni’s portraits indicate the occupation of the sitter: popes and cardinals have a square format, writers have oval frames, and artists have dodecagonal ones. It is possible that despite their similarities, Leoni’s portrait prints were not intended as a series as such, but simply reflect the fact that he kept working within a preferred visual format over a long period of time.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Giuseppe Cesare, called Cavaliere d'Arpino, a bust-length portrait in a twelve-sided frameGiuseppe Cesare, called Cavaliere d'Arpino, a bust-length portrait in a twelve-sided frameGiuseppe Cesare, called Cavaliere d'Arpino, a bust-length portrait in a twelve-sided frameGiuseppe Cesare, called Cavaliere d'Arpino, a bust-length portrait in a twelve-sided frameGiuseppe Cesare, called Cavaliere d'Arpino, a bust-length portrait in a twelve-sided frame

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.