Design for a Sword or Dagger Handle with the Suicide of Cleopatra
1592–93
Medium
Engraving and blackwork
Dimensions
Sheet (trimmed): 2 15/16 × 1 1/8 in. (7.5 × 2.8 cm)
Classification
Prints|Ornament & Architecture
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1962
Accession Number
62.598.157
Tags
About the Artist
Theodor de Bry · 1528–1598
Theodor de Bry was born in 1528 in Liège, in what is now Belgium, into a family of jewelers and engravers. Trained as a goldsmith and copper-plate engraver — skills he refined under his grandfather, Thiry de Bry the Elder — he worked across several European cities before religious persecution forced him into exile. As a Protestant living under Spanish rule in the Southern Netherlands, de Bry was s...