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Documentation of Stosch's gems

During his exceptional career as a collector, dealer and researcher of intaglios and cameos, Philipp von Stosch amassed ca. 3,500 original engraved gems and glass pastes, which, after his death, were sold in 1764 by his heir Heinrich Wilhelm Muzell-Stosch (1723-1782) to Frederick Wilhelm II, King of Prussia (1786-1797), and is now housed in the Antikensammlung Staatliche Mussen zu Berlin. Stosch's collection was the biggest and the most diverse of all contemporary cabinets. It included Egyptian, Persian, Etruscan, Greek, Roman, early Christian, medieval and post-classical (mostly seventeenth and eighteenth century) gems, though some parts of the collection did not go to Berlin, as Muzell-Stosch managed to sell them shortly after Stosch's death elsewhere. Apart from the gems, Stosch created an enormous dactyliotheca - a set of gem impressions and casts - numbering 28,000 specimens, which were later purchased by James Tassie (1735-1799) and became the basis of his own editions.

Title page of Stosch gem collection catalogueIn the last years of his life, Stosch became acquainted with Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768). They corresponded and perhaps even met once during Stosch's short visit to Rome in 1756. Having noticed his great potential as a scholar, Stosch recommended Winckelmann to the post of librarian to Cardinal Alessandro Albani (1692-1779), and he nominated him his 'spiritual heir'. He invited Winckelmann to write a catalogue of his gem collection. After Stosch's death in 1757, Muzell-Stosch repeated this invitation, as he thought it would be useful to advertise the collection before the sale. However, once Winckelmann came to Florence, he was so impressed by the collections and archives Stosch collected in his house that he decided to write not a simple sale list but a regular catalogue raisoneé. He did not need to start from scratch though, since Stosch himself together with his brother Heinrich Wilhelm (1699-1747) regularly catalogued his gems, at least up to 1747.

Apart from this, it is now clear that Stosch also had his own gems documented by numerous artists employed in his house studio in the visual form. They produced drawings of his objects according to the carefully designed standards. The drawings presented the gems enlarged with all details of their iconography, and the information on the material (type of the gemstone) used was also given. The draughtsmen additionally provided provenance information, and there were empty spaces left for the future short subject-matter descriptions or relevant references to the written catalogue (see some examples in the gallery below). Besides that, some of those drawings had commentaries to gems' devices provided as well. These documentary drawings are now mostly in the collections of the Princes Czartoryski Museum in Krakow and the Kunstbibliothek - Ornamentstichsammlung in Berlin. One of the goals of our project is to identify Stosch's gems on the drawings from these collections and contextualise them within the historical framework outlined above. So far, we have managed to identify 800 of them, but more gems should be identified in the near future.

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