This drawing of St. Nicholas of Bari, the model for Santa Claus,[1] was done by the artist Jean-Robert Ango (b. unknown, d. 1773) after the statue of the saint on the colonnade of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Ango, originally from France, lived and worked in Rome from 1759 to 1772. During this time he...

There is a story that an orca came into the harbor at Ostia, Rome’s ancient port, during the reign of Emperor Claudius, right when Claudius was reconstructing the harbor. The orca, or killer whale, was attracted by a local shipwreck, and had been feeding in the harbor for some days when it became trapped by...

While this drawing is the sole example in the Cooper Hewitt’s collection of Giovanni Piancastelli’s work as an artist, his impact on the museum as a collector is astronomically greater: over 12,200 of Cooper Hewitt’s drawings and prints came directly or indirectly from his personal collection. Born in a town near Ravenna, Italy in 1845,...

This drawing is the creation of Jean-Jacques Lequeu, a French architect and draftsman of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. A faint inscription in the bottom right corner of the drawing announces that it is a project for a monument at the entrance to the navy arsenal in Toulon, a major port in the...

This drawing by Giuseppe Barberi is a design for a church. But almost nothing about the structure is typical of 18th-century European churches. The briskly sketched cross that tops the dome announces the Christian nature of the building, but nearly everything below it is of pre-Christian design. The squat, round dome supported by a colonnade...

Have we fallen down? What is going on here? The perspective in this late 17th-century Italian drawing is so strange because it is meant to be viewed from below. This drawing was done in preparation for a painted ceiling, a frequent feature of the sumptuous palaces and grand churches built in Italy in the 16th-19th...