β: This is a Beta release of the Fitzwilliam Museum's potential new website.
We want to co-design
our Virtual Museum presence with you.
You can return to our current site at any time.
Following the Government announcement yesterday, museums and galleries in Cambridge will be closed to the public as part of a period of national/local restrictions. So, with great sadness, we will not be able to reopen as planned on 2 January 2021.
This exhibition looks at the spread and development of prints representing abstract qualities such as the Five Senses, Seven Virtues and Deadly Sins. German and Netherlandish sixteenth-century examples feature female figures accompanied by animals associated with the concept in question, or holding significant objects or attributes. At the turn of the seventeenth century, printmakers in Holland, France and England became more inventive, moving away from traditional allegorical depictions to pairs of amorous couples, women in fashionable dress and elaborate domestic scenes.