A Group of Unknown Drawings by Matthäus Gänther for Some of His Main Works

Abstract

Drawings of the great South German and Austrian fresco painters of the Baroque have, as a rule, not travelled very far. As those artists were first of all religious painters, and their works adorn churches, abbeys, and monasteries, the contents of their studios, such as sketches and projects went, after their death mostly into the libraries and print collections of the big monasteries. Nowadays, the largest and most comprehensive assemblies are concentrated in the Albertina in Vienna and in the Graphische Sammlung in Munich. These most representative collections were mainly built up from former ecclesiastic property. In spite of the collecting activity of the museums of Central Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many of those drawings still remain in their quiet ecclesiastic hiding places, as art commerce did not search for them so eagerly as for the works of the earlier periods. Collector's taste in Central and Eastern Europe, however, did not neglect them. Many splendid examples can be fo...