Book cover with zigzag and floral pattern
18th century
Medium
Relief print (wood or metal)
Dimensions
Sheet: 8 × 6 in. (20.3 × 15.2 cm)
Classification
Prints
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1948
Accession Number
48.142.56
Art Historical Context
Step into the world of 18th-century with this charming *Book Cover with Zigzag and Floral*, an anonymous relief print from the Metropolitan Museum Art's Drawings and Prints department. Measuring a compact 8 × 6 inches (20.3 × 15.2 cm), this delicate sheet captures a lively design of interlocking zigzags and blooming florals—motifs that evoke the ornate decorative tastes of the Enlightenment era, when books were prized possessions adorned like fine jewelry. Crafted via relief printing, likely from a wood or metal block, the technique involved carving away negative space to leave raised lines i...
About the Artist
Anonymous
In the vast tapestry of art history, "Anonymous" stands not as a singular individual but as a collective designation for countless unidentified creators whose works have endured across millennia. These artists, spanning prehistoric cave painters to medieval illuminators and folk craftsmen, produced the foundational layers of human visual culture. Prior to the Renaissance, when individual fame emer...