Due to the high artistic quality of its holdings ? which encompass some 25,000 drawings and 75,000 prints dating from the late Middle Ages to the present ? the Stadel Museum"s Department of Prints and Drawings is among the most prominent graphic art collections in Germany. It was founded in the eighteenth century and expanded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For reasons of conservation, works on paper cannot be displayed on a permanent basis like paintings, but only placed for visitors" viewing in the department"s Study Hall. Comprising eighty superb drawings, this collection spans a period of nearly six hundred years: the oldest drawings depicted date from the early fifteenth century; the most recent were executed in the late twentieth.