L'Amoureux

Art Historical Context

Step into the intimate world of 15th German printmaking with *L'Amoureux* (The Lover), a delicate metalcut created by an anonymous artist around that era. Measuring just 4 1/2 x 2 3/4 inches, this tiny print captures a tender moment between lovers, evoking the romantic themes popular in late medieval Europe. Housed in the Metropolitan Museum Art's Drawings and Prints, it entered the collection via the Rogers Fund in 1918. Metalcut, a pioneering technique from the 1460s–1480s, involved incising designs into a thin metal plate (often iron or zinc), then printing the resulting relief. This metho...