Klee produced alea jacta (The Die is Cast) in March 1940, after the war had begun and only three months before his death. As was his custom, he gave his drawing a poetic title. The Latin phrase »alea jacta« recalls not only Caesar’s well-known…

Due to building measures for the expansion of the Städel Museum, several artworks from the collection cannot be shown at the moment. These paintings were lent to exhibitions abroad but can presumably be seen again at the Städel Museum in the…

After Hendrick Goltzius, the Antwerp painter Jacques de Gheyn – who also produced drawings and copper engravings – was probably the most important Dutch graphic artist of the generation before Rembrandt. His fame is based in part on a number of…

Poussin was the chief exponent of a classicist strain of Baroque art which runs counter to our understanding of that epoch due to the restrained quality of its pathos, a characteristic learned from antique art. He spent most of his life in Rome…

The complicated technique of printing with multiple woodcut blocks creates a painting-like quality: not only colour effects are attained with it, but lighter and darker passages are shown in contrast with a tone of medium intensity…

Robert Campin’s magnificent painting, with its macabre, detailed depiction of the battered corpse of one of the thieves who was crucified with Jesus, is the only surviving remnant of one of the most important Netherlandish altarpieces of the…

In 1524, the merchant and city councillor Gobel Schmitgen, the emblem of whose house is emblazoned on the left wing, donated this triptych for the north side altar of his parish church of St. Maria Lyskirchen in Cologne. In commissioning Joos van…

In Florence in November 1655, Stefano della Bella executed drawings of an elephant which had just perished. It was reportedly the very animal which had been presented to the public in many European cities in the course of the two preceding…