The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem

Domenico dalle Greche

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The print is on two joined sheets and depicts the church of the Holy Sepulchre Jerusalem and its surrounding architectural complex. Various figures fill the foreground: scholars, merchant, pilgrims and soldiers. The print is closely related to another woodcut of the same subject and of similar size, an impression of which can be found in the British Museum (1935,0713.6). That print has the date 1546 in a cartouche providing an approximate date for the present print. Dalle Greche was a Woodcutter and publisher who worked in Venice in the 1540s. He is best known as the publisher of the 1549 edition of Titian's 12-block woodcut of the Drowning of Pharaoh's Army in the Red Sea (see 22.73.3.131–138). The print is a striking example of sort of large-scale print that were produced in Venice in the sixteenth century and for which the city was justly famous.

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