Three ox skulls, two horse skulls, and a grotesque head, study for "Democritus in Meditation"

1662

Dating: Exact year
Held at: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Medium: Etching and drypoint
Dimensions: Sheet: 5 9/16 × 3 9/16 in. (14.2 × 9.1 cm)
Collection no.: 53.509.7
Attribution: By the artist
Image rights: CC0 1.0License details

Salvator Rosa. Three ox skulls, two horse skulls, and a grotesque head, study for "Democritus in Meditation". Salvator Rosa; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1953. CC0 1.0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/). Full-frame proportional resize and JPEG compression.

Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

About this artwork

Three ox skulls, two horse skulls, and a grotesque head, study for "Democritus in Meditation" — Salvator Rosa. 1662.

Medium: Etching and drypoint. Dimensions: Sheet: 5 9/16 × 3 9/16 in. (14.2 × 9.1 cm).

Collection record: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Museum connection according to this source; current display unverified.

Credit line: The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1953.

This is a museum catalogue record, not a current-display assertion.

Source: official collection record. Metadata selected and normalized by Artline from the source export, accessed 10 September 2026; no museum endorsement. Reproduction rights are separate.

Location checked Sep 10, 2026. This does not indicate whether the work is on display.

Artwork sources

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