The research within the Project Stosch is largely based on drawings of engraved gems commissioned by Philipp von Stosch to several distinguished artists, like Pier Leone Ghezzi (1674-1755), Hieronymus Odam (ca. 1681-1741), Bernard Picart (1673-1733), Anton Maria Zanetti (1679-1767), Carl Marcus Tuscher (1705-1751), Theodorus Netscher (1661-1728), Georg Martin Preissler (1700-1754), Johann Justus Preissler (1698-1771) and Johann Adam Schweickart (1722-1787), who faithfully reproduced gems for him. Their production is virtually unknown since the major groups of drawings they made were considered lost or were unknown. The recent discoveries turned our knowledge on this matter upside down as it turns out that the studio organised by Stosch documented in the visual form and described thousands of ancient intaglios and cameos.
The largest and the most diverse collection of drawings performed in Stosch’s atelier is the assemblage of 28 folio volumes, including 2269 drawings preserved in one of the departments of the National Museum in Krakow – the Collections of the Princes Czartoryski Museum. It has never been the subject of scientific research and remains unpublished. Very little is known about its history, provenance and purpose, thus our aim is to reconstruct every piece of information related to it. The drawings entered the Czartoryski Family collection thanks to Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski (1770-1861), who purchased them in 1800 in Florence. They can be divided into several classes according to techniques and styles and attributed to individual artists who once worked for Stosch. Furthermore, it is possible to connect them to Stosch’s individual research and documentary projects. As a result, the collection provides a wide-ranging insight into eighteenth-century documentary techniques of intaglios and cameos, and it enables us to judge Stosch’s considerable input into the development of glyptic studies.
The second major source are six volumes entitled Pierres Gravees Du Roi Auec Figures rediscovered in the Kunstbibliothek - Ornamentstichsammlung in Berlin after more than 200 years. They include nearly 850 drawings of intaglios and cameos made by Hieronymus Odam, Johann Justin Preissler and Carl Markus Tuscher for Stosch. They were recorded by Ernst Heinrich Toelken (1785-1864) in the holdings of the Antikensammlung in Berlin last time in 1816 and since then they were considered lost or destroyed. Similarly to the assemblage from Krakow, this collection contains a large number of Stosch’s gems reproduced in the visual form, but there are also many works representing gems from other contemporary cabinets of gems. Together with the drawings now housed in Krakow, the ones in Berlin constitute the majority of Stosch’s extensive pictorial archive of engraved gems, which helped him to develop his scholarly enterprises.
The third major and important collection to be analysed within the project is the so-called Spencer-Churchill Album, including 85 drawings in red chalk by Bernard Picart – his original drawings after which plates in Stosch’s book Gemmae antiquae celatae, published in 1724, were made. These drawings, once in the possession of Stosch’s protector and good friend François Fagel (1659-1746), were dispersed at the auction in 1965 and are now scattered among public institutions and private collections. The goal is to collect them all and reunite with Picart’s other gem drawings that escaped the album even earlier and analyse them in the context of Stosch’s first scholarly publication.
Apart from these, individual gem drawings and their groups found in public institutions like the Royal Library of the Netherlands in The Hague or Biblioteca Marucelliana in Florence, as well as those registered at the art market, are also investigated. All these sources are neatly catalogued, described, attributed to artists collaborating with Philipp von Stosch, and connected to his research and documentary projects. An attempt is made to identify the gems they reproduce and ascribe them to their original collections thanks to the additional information accompanying the drawings themselves, as well as provenance research. In many cases, the drawings are the only documentation of specific intaglios and cameos now considered lost, which raises their scientific value. In other instances, the drawings prove that some gems were produced at least in the first half of the eighteenth century, if not earlier, and the explanations of their iconography written by Stosch himself and his collaborators unveil the current, considerable state of knowledge about these fascinating archaeological artefacts and ancient civilisations in general.
