Artwork story
About Design for a Plate with Neptune in a Shell Drawn by Horses in a Medallion Bordered by Sea Monsters
The artist and artwork
Adriaen Collaert engraved this Design for a Plate with Neptune around 1600, and the Netherlandish printmaker Philips Galle published it. The small paper sheet is not the finished metal plate: it presents a design that a maker could adapt. Fine hatching turns its flat circles into water, flesh, scales, shells, and a dark rectangular ground. At the center, the nude sea god Neptune sits in a shell chariot with his trident while horses pull him across a seascape.
The world around it
The print emerged from Antwerp's late-Renaissance culture of specialist designers, engravers, publishers, and artisans. Paper designs could travel farther and be repeated more readily than a unique silver vessel. The Met explains that ornament prints multiplied with advances in papermaking and printmaking and often served as patterns for craftspeople supplying a growing merchant class. Classical gods, grotesques, and sea monsters offered a learned but adaptable vocabulary for plates, jewelry, furniture, and other objects. Collaert's image therefore joins mythology to commercial design: an engraved sheet could advertise invention, circulate among workshops, and preserve an idea even if no finished object survives.
A detail to notice
Plate 3 belongs to a four-print series of mythological figures associated with the sea. Neptune occupies a small medallion, but the broad outer band nearly overwhelms him. Fish, a ray, crab, lobster, shells, sea monsters, and fish-tailed beings spin around the rim; putti ride or grapple with creatures among the waves. A braided edge suggests a decorated dish, while crosshatching isolates the pale circle. The bottom margin preserves the collaboration: `Adrianus Collaert fecit` credits Collaert with making the image, and `Philippus Galle excudit` identifies Galle as publisher. The Met calls the sheet a plate design and does not identify a completed vessel made from it. The most elaborate surviving object may therefore be the paper proposal itself.
Look closer: materials, scale, and subjects
The recorded object is print ornament & architecture made in Engraving and held in the Drawings and Prints department.
Recorded dimensions include Sheet: 6 5/8 × 6 9/16 in. (16.9 × 16.6 cm).
Subject terms include Monsters, Neptune, and Horses. Treat them as guideposts, not a complete interpretation.
Collection history and public-domain source
The collection credit line is Rogers Fund, 1917.
The individual artwork page and official image were verified as Public Domain on 2026-08-23.
No Context Gallery independently uses the public-domain image. The source museum has not endorsed, sponsored, or affiliated itself with these products.
Research sources
See the products currently available with this artwork. Product choices appear only when the exact item is published, in stock, and available to purchase.
