Magical Gems from the Collection of Constantine Schmidt-Ciążyński and from other Polish Collections

Abstract

Engraved gems, both intaglios and cameos, formed a highly significant aspect of European collecting from the Renaissance onwards. Their obvious attraction was that, like coins, they preserved perfect or near-perfect images of whatever the ancient artist had produced. While in earlier centuries the collectors were mainly princes like the Medici or aristocrats such as the Earl of Arundel and the Duke of Buckingham, by the late eighteenth and especially the nineteenth century they were joined not only by scholars like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Germany, 1 together with (somewhat later) S. S. Lewis and C. W. King in Cambridge, 2 but by those engaged in commerce – including the antiquities trade – like Joseph Mayer. 3 These new collectors inevitably lacked the vast resources of Catherine the Great or the Duke of Marlborough in the previous century and their collections were inevitably smaller or at least more diverse in quality. The present volume is concerned with one such enthusiast, a Pole whose eventful life shifted between Warsaw, St Petersburg, Paris, London and finally Krakow. He was evidently a successful entrepreneur, a cosmopolitan engaged in selling antiquities but also enhancing the collections of various museums throughout Europe, where he would seem to have been regarded as a learned and well-respected scholar. He clearly had a particular interest in and eye for Egyptian antiquities, as revealed by the scarabs and ushabtis which he purchased and which, like his gems, ended up in the National Museum at Krakow. However, there is no evidence that he was actively travelling and collecting in Egypt, like his contemporary the Revd Greville Chester (1830–1892).