Abstract
The article examines the changing approach to the conservation of mounting papers for Renaissance drawings in the château in Kroměříž. In the past, the mounting papers were regarded as material of secondary importance, which was more of a hindrance to the study of the drawings or merely served as reinforcement.
The current approach, however, places the emphasis on the conservation and preservation of all the extant components of the mounting process, for even small pieces of mounts or mounting paper can be of great importance in the context of a collection of drawings that has been preserved, and can reveal the hitherto unknown history of the drawings. The investigation of the mounting papers for some of these drawings that we carried out uncovered new possibilities for interpreting the provenance of the individual drawings, to which no attention had so far been devoted.
In the collections of the Archbishopric of Olomouc in the Czech Republic can be found a total of 67 Renaissance drawings, kept in the château in Kroměříž, which testify to the activities of church representatives as collectors in the 17th century. The drawings were kept in six collectors' albums purchased by Bishop Karl II of Lichtenstein-Castelcorn from the brothers Franz and Bernard von Imstenraed, in 1673.
These albums of Lichtenstein can probably be identified with the albums purchased for Count Thomas Howard of Arundel in Amsterdam in 1637. Some of them can even be directly linked with the collection of Nicolas Lanier, who worked both for the Count of Arundel and for the English King Charles I.
Until the 1980s, the drawings were largely neglected (with only a few original drawings being restored), and so the biggest changes that took place were in the mounting. Some of them were inexpertly separated from the original mounting paper in an attempt to discover what was hidden on the reverse side.
Others were glued onto a new sheet of paper, in some cases together with the previous mounting paper glued to the whole surface and in some cases without. The mounting paper was removed from a number of drawings and was no longer considered to be of any value.
In some cases it was even removed without any record of this, as the approach at that time consisted in paying attention only to the drawing itself. Unfortunately this meant that an important source of information about the provenance of the drawings was lost.
However, some interesting information is provided by my recent examination of the three drawings St John the Baptist Preaching by Il Fiammenghino (KE 4536), Fragment of a Female Figure by Amico Aspertini (KE 4533), and Allegory of a River by Il Cerano (KE 4506), in which we noticed several common features. Their whole area is glued onto paper which has the same watermark in each case.
Furthermore, on each paper can be found the remains of an attribution in a fine pen identifying the artist who made the drawing, which has subsequently been partly cut off or partially erased. The similar mounting of these three drawings thus indicates that they come from the same collection, and the watermark points towards a probable English provenance.
In other words, they were first owned by English collectors, then made their way onto the auction list of the brothers Imstenraed, and from there to Kroměříž. Fortunately, at the present time restorers take a holistic approach towards working with drawings and the methodology of their conservation.
It is taken for granted that the mounting materials should be preserved, together with photodocumentation of them. Likewise, drawings are now evaluated not as isolated works, but as works whose supporting materials tell us something about their history: whether they were exhibited, in what way and in which kind of environment they were stored, and who may have investigated them.
The present investigation is based on regarding drawings as part of a collection as a whole, and by analysing the mounting papers it aims to shed fresh light on the so far unclear history and origin of the albums of drawings in Kroměříž within the framework of the collecting activities of the Archbishops of Olomouc.