Drawings for Emblem Books and Lives of the Saints from the Collection of Count Charles Cobenzl: on the Authorship of Abraham van Diepenbeeck

Abstract

Amongst the more than four thousand drawings of the collection of Count Charles Cobenzl, formed in Brussels between 1761 and 1768 and today mostly in the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, are a number of small sheets kept under the name of Abraham van Diepenbeeck. The author clarifies their relationship to his oeuvre, identifying them as designs by different artists for in-text illustrations in books published in Antwerp in the second quarter of the seventeenth century. The history of these drawings, some of which were formerly in the celebrated drawings collection of the banker Pierre Crozat in Paris, throws light on the circulation of drawings in the eighteenth century. Moreover, it provides the first indications of the composition of the drawings collection of Francois-Ernest de Salm Reifferscheid, Bishop of Tournai, of which little was previously known.