Drawings from the Holy Roman Empire 1540–1680 must have appeared to the untutored eye as a fairly miscellaneous exhibition of drawings, themselves a very miscellaneous genre. Perhaps their only common ground lies in that even more ineffable geographical expression: the Holy Roman Empire. Yet for all the accidental quality of its provenance, the show possessed a certain logic. Let us note two crude facts about it: firstly the threefold and almost equal division between religious and classical subjects and a third group of "modern" topics, landscape and genre—what might be called the new "inquisitive eye"; secondly the clear focus on the years around 1600 and the area of southern Germany and Bohemia. To both of these aspects I shall return in due course.