Like many other artists active in central and northern Europe at the end of the sixteenth century, Muller had a liking for subjects both erotic and esoteric. This drawing focuses on a littleknown passage from Homer’s Odyssey, featuring the brief and tragic love affair between Demeter, the Greek goddess of agriculture—known as Ceres in Roman mythology—and the young hero Iasion. Here, the artist depicts the moment when the lovers are discovered by Jupiter. As the canopy hanging over the bed flies open, vivid rays of light, emanating from Jupiter, illuminate their entangled bodies. The figures’ oversize limbs and contorted poses, delineated using pen lines that swell and break with a nervous rhythm, are typical of Muller’s early draftsmanship.

In this drawing, Zeus (known as Jupiter in Roman mythology), disguised as an eagle, abducts Ganymede, a young Greek hero hailing from the city of Troy. Although Ganymede was admired for his unmatched beauty and often depicted in an erotically charged manner, Rembrandt characterizes him as a frightened, unruly toddler who squirms and screams as Zeus carries him away. The artist’s exuberant marks range from bold, zigzagging lines, which delineate the eagle’s body, to the loose swirls on the right side of the composition, which do not seem to serve a specific descriptive function. The drawing was used as a preparatory study for Rembrandt’s painting The Abduction of Ganymede, which is also part of the Dresden collection.

Made three decades after The Abduction of Ganymede, on view nearby, Diana and Actaeon exemplifies the reduced, angular manner of drawing that Rembrandt developed in his late works. At left, Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt, is bathing in the company of her nymphs. The group is observed by the young mortal Actaeon, who stands on an elevated bank at right, behind a large tree trunk. As described by the Roman poet Ovid, Diana punishes Actaeon’s voyeurism by transforming him into a stag. In this sheet, Rembrandt simultaneously portrays the moment when the goddess realizes that she has been observed and the subsequent punishment, showing Actaeon as part human and part animal, with his face transformed into a muzzle and antlers sprouting from his head.

This sheet belongs to a group of large-scale, highly finished drawings that Lievens created in the early years of his career. It focuses on the suspenseful banquet that Esther, an Old Testament heroine, prepared for her husband, the Persian king Ahasuerus, and his vizier, Haman. With her gaze fixed on Ahasuerus, Esther gestures emphatically toward Haman, who had been secretly plotting to annihilate the Jewish people. As his vicious plan is being uncovered, Haman crouches in his chair, his face submerged in the shadows. The drama of the event is enhanced by Lievens’s bold use of chiaroscuro effects and his decision to position the figures in the middle ground, with a curtain framing the composition at left, which effectively transforms the scene into a stage.

During his two visits to Rome, Rubens studied the Laocoön (shown below) more intently than any other ancient statue. The chilling depiction of the anguished Trojan priest, struggling to release himself from the tight coils of the snakes that threaten to suffocate him and his two children, provided the artist with an opportunity to observe a male body engaged in an intense physical struggle. Rubens created a dense, pulsating network of lines, methodically capturing the tense muscles and protruding veins of Laocoön’s torso and right arm in black chalk. The sculpture is observed from below and sideways, exemplifying the artist’s interest in finding unusual and dynamic viewpoints when drawing ancient sculpture.

Born in the Netherlands, Candid spent most of his early life in Florence, where he was active as a painter and tapestry designer. In 1586, he moved to Munich, joining the cohort of international artists working for Wilhelm V, Duke of Bavaria. This drawing served as a preparatory study for a print commemorating the foremost architectural project in the city at this time—the construction and decoration of Saint Michael’s Church. It reproduces one of the building’s principal façade elements, a large bronze sculpture representing the archangel Michael defeating the devil. Composed of layers of delicate gray wash and dense areas of hatching, the drawing successfully conveys both the sculpture’s intricate surface detail and its overall monumental effect.

This sensitive drawing, which depicts an angel leading the soul of a deceased man to heaven, was made by Tanzio in preparation for his fresco decorations in the Chapel of the Guardian Angel in the Basilica of San Gaudenzio, Novara, completed in 1629. The drawing corresponds closely with two figures painted in the chapel, who glide aloft on clouds at the base of the vault. The angel guides the deceased with his right hand and gestures with his left, directing his charge to look up toward the vault’s apex, where Christ appears. Tanzio’s finished study focuses on this moment of divine revelation, delicately rendering the interplay of light and shadow across the figures.

Characterized by a strong sense of immediacy, this drawing was likely based on a life study. Goltzius outlined the contours of the figure’s headdress and face using swift, sharp strokes of red chalk, and skillfully described the soft surface of the skin by rubbing powdery red pigment with a finger or stump. Despite the drawing’s compelling naturalism, the identity of the subject remains unclear. While scholars have traditionally referred to the figure as an older woman, the thick neck with the Adam’s apple protruding right below the chin, the unruly short hair playfully sticking out from underneath the headdress, and the overall lack of idealization suggest that the subject may be a male figure in a chaperon, a type of headwear popular in the Middle Ages.

Anguissola was born to a noble northern Italian family and, together with her six siblings, received a comprehensive humanistic education and training in the art of painting. Perhaps because her gender precluded her from studying anatomy or working with nude models, she focused on portraiture, often turning to sitters in her familial and social circles. This study, which might be a self-portrait, is an example of the artist’s direct yet sensitive approach to the portrait genre and her assured drawing technique. Although Anguissola’s drawing skill was praised by her contemporaries, extremely few sheets by the artist survive today.

Study with Four Pilgrims and a Cupid relates to Watteau’s painting The Embarkation for Cythera. He first depicted the subject around 1709–12 and returned to it a few years later, producing two variations. In these convivial works, groups of elegantly dressed young people mingle in bucolic settings as they prepare to embark for the Greek island that was, according to classical legend, the birthplace of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. In 1717, the French Academy described Watteau’s Embarkation for Cythera as a fête galante, giving a name to the genre that would become the artist’s signature development. In this drawing, Watteau adeptly varied the pressure of the red chalk to define the fashionable characters.

Considered one of the pioneers and most important representatives of Neoclassicism, Anton Raphael Mengs began his training as a child under his father, the Saxon court painter Ismael Mengs. Anton Raphael graduated from this early, intensive tutelage around 1740, when he was twelve years old—the same year that Ismael and his children began a fouryear stay in Italy to continue their artistic education. This remarkable self-portrait, the earliest to survive by Anton Raphael, was drawn in that year, before the family’s move. A testament to the artist’s precocious talent, the drawing sensitively blends the black and red chalk to create a lifelike record of the young Mengs’s features as studied in a mirror.

In this large and commanding self-portrait, Maratti, one of the leading protagonists of the Roman Baroque, represents himself at about the age of sixty, when he was at the height of his artistic influence. In a virtuosic display, the artist elaborated his features and the fall of light with a meticulous network of cross-hatching using a sharp piece of red chalk. The drawing was not made in preparation for a painting but is instead an autonomous work of art, serving as both a record of Maratti’s likeness and a potent demonstration of his artistic abilities.

A group of monks, identified by their habits, pore over an open book; uneven light flickers across the scene, deftly rendered with brush and wash. The relationship and significance of the older man and younger woman standing together behind the main group, seemingly uninterested in seeing the volume, are ambiguous. The caricature-like faces and coarse delight of the three monks in the foreground imply that their book is not devotional and announce the drawing’s satirical nature. This sheet comes from one of several private albums that Goya compiled throughout his career. As in many of his published prints, the imagery in these drawings is replete with social criticism directed at the clergy, among others.

This album, containing dozens of portraits by several artists of rulers and noblemen from the Mughal Empire and the Deccan, was in the possession of the Dresden court by the end of the seventeenth century. Following a traditional representational style, these two portraits show Muhammad ‘Ādil Shāh, Sultan of Bijapur, at right, and Ikhlās Khān, his military commander and influential minister, at left. Often copied from earlier depictions, the subjects of the album’s portraits are identified by specific physical characteristics and attributes such as attire and weapons, though the artists expressed their individuality by introducing subtle variations. In the right-hand portrait, the unknown artist’s creativity and skill are especially evident in the depiction of the transparent muslin skirt.

This boldly colored depiction of two groups of women rowing ceremonial boats before a palace garden backed by mountains belongs to a genre known as xingle xt (行乐图, pictures of life at leisure). The idyllic scene was executed using the exacting Gongbi technique (工笔, Careful Brush Technique), combining meticulous brushwork, bold colors, and jiehua, the precise rendering of architecture with a traditional ruler called a jiechi (界尺). This late Ming dynasty watercolor is one of nine related landscapes in Dresden that descend from the collection of Nicolaas Witsen (1641–1717), a mayor of Amsterdam and collector of Asian art. The Kupferstich-Kabinett acquired several Chinese and Indian works from the sale of Witsen’s estate in 1728.

In the first half of the eighteenth century, the architectural and cultural landscape of Dresden underwent a radical transformation. Focused on making the city into a major European capital, the Saxon rulers commissioned ambitious architectural projects and assembled a remarkable number of foreign artists at the court. Bellotto arrived in Dresden in 1747, bringing with him the Venetian tradition of vedute, or highly detailed topographical views. In this work, the viewer gazes from the right bank of the Elbe River toward the Augustus Bridge and the Old Town. The Dresden Castle, where the Kupferstich-Kabinett is located today, can be seen on the far right of the image, behind the newly built Dresden Cathedral. The only print included in the exhibition, this view conveys the splendor of Dresden during the decades shortly after the official establishment of the Kupferstich-Kabinett.