https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2078-5816
Abstract
No material is linked more closely to early modern Prussia than amber, and both the Hohenzollerns (rulers of Brandenburg-Prussia) and the Vasas (overlords of Royal Prussia) used it extensively for diplomatic gifts, linking this prized material to their territories. Amber was also one of the most enigmatic materials of the period, with its alchemical nature often examined by natural philosophers who sought to determine its origins and physical makeup. Prussian artisans participated in these explorations by foregrounding amber’s metamorphic qualities. Many amber artefacts carved in Königsberg and Danzig self-reflectively depict the transformation of the Heliades, the daughters of the Sun, into poplar trees, an Ovidian trope important for the understanding of amber as a material that was once something else. This article explores how the physical properties of cups, caskets and altarpieces carved in amber had consequences for how these objects were used and activated as a vehicle of elite sociability. By tapping into natural-philosophical treatises, descriptions of places, gift records and poetry, it proposes that amber’s material rhetoric was twofold: (1) to frame the geographically peripheral Prussia as a centre of cultural activity and material exploration, and (2) to encourage the perception of amber-made artefacts as multivalent media capable of evoking multiple geographic locations. It thus delves into the transcultural implications of amber, a Prussian material that simultaneously publicized and obfuscated its origins.
A merman sits on a sea monster atop a nautilus cup made of amber (Fig. 1). The vessel is dated and signed, allowing for its precise attribution to the Königsberg-based master Jacob Heise (d. 1667), who completed the piece in 1659.1 One of the most celebrated Prussian amber artisans of his age, Heise shows a remarkable mastery of form and technique: he assembled the artwork from over thirty elaborately curved, mostly transparent amber plates decorated with aquatic motifs in bas-relief, an artful rendering that became a hallmark of his workshop.2 Masterful in his artistry, Heise may have selected amber for this elegant maritime subject not just to flaunt technical skill, but also to play on the material’s significance as a natural resource found in a specific body of water, the Baltic Sea. Given the context of production and the resonant iconography featuring figurative and ornamental marine detail, the artefact comes embedded with a spatial hermeneutic framework accessible to viewers familiar with the whereabouts of amber gathering and facture. Add the maker’s residential and professional ties to Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad), one of the most eminent centres of amber artisanship, and the question arises whether all these geographical clues and references circumscribed the meaning of carved ambers within a specific interpretative context. Above all, did locating the material in Prussia, a maritime region well known for amber extraction and handicraft, prove a necessary component of Heise’s cup’s reception outside its original artistic geography?
Jacob Heise, Ornamental vessel in the form of a nautilus bowl, 1659. Amber of various varieties, ivory, silver, gilded; the foot and cup are connected by a wooden rod, 34.5 x 14.5 x 12 cm. Dresden, Grünes Gewölbe, IV 340. Source: © Grünes Gewölbe, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Photo by Jürgen Karpinski.
Prussia, a historical land located on the southern Baltic shore (encompassing today’s Pomerania Province in Poland and the Kaliningrad Oblast in Russia), had a near-monopoly on amber’s extraction in Europe until the late seventeenth century, when viable deposits were found and exploited in Sicily.3 A majority German-speaking area, Prussia lay outside the Holy Roman Empire, and between 1525 and 1657 it was in its entirety under the suzerainty of the kings of Poland. The eastern half (the duchy of Prussia, also known as Ducal Prussia) was ruled by the Hohenzollerns, who as dukes of Prussia swore fealty to the Polish king, while the western half (Royal Prussia) was directly under Polish rule. In 1657, the duchy of Prussia became a sovereign state, and in 1701 a kingdom. In 1772, Poland lost Royal Prussia to its erstwhile vassal, and the territory was reunited under the Hohenzollerns, by then one of Europe’s most powerful ruling families.4
Throughout the early modern period, amber was continually acknowledged as Prussia’s most valuable export, and all Prussian rulers (be they the Hohenzollerns or the Vasas) were keen to maintain their symbolic monopoly over the precious resource.5 One way of ensuring the claim was by employing Prussian carved ambers in diplomatic exchanges. Heise’s nautilus cup is a prime example.6 Commissioned as a gift from Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg and Prussia (r. 1640–1688) to Johann Georg II of Saxony (r. 1656–1680), the vessel was duly recorded in the 1732 inventory of the Dresden Pretiosenzimmer as ‘an amber bowl with aquatic images made in white amber, crowned by a Neptune; presented by the then Prince Elector of Brandenburg to Prince Elector [of Saxony] Johann Georg II; received 25 September 1662’.7 Friedrich Wilhelm had initially ordered two identical vessels from Heise for himself, capitalizing on unrestricted access to high-quality amber sourced in his realm.8 By commissioning two enticing pieces, perhaps with the idea in mind that the spare be given to another prince, he would hence fashion himself as the patron of most desirable carved ambers, many of which began their itinerant lives in Prussia.
But what exactly was the benefit of claiming the material for Prussia, and was it even possible to do so? For starters, neither Heise nor any other celebrated Prussian amber artisans (on whom more will follow) were court artists; they were guild masters and journeymen, and patrons like Friedrich Wilhelm therefore had limited control over their artistic practice. Prussian makers were not bound to a particular aesthetic language that strengthened territorial or confessional associations, and rulers would buy their work to use these artefacts as gifts among art lovers of different confessions across Europe. While amber’s association with Prussia was promulgated by naturalist treatises, most of which were published outside the region,9 while Prussians themselves actively participated in investigating amber’s physical, optical, olfactory, and medicinal properties,10 and while Prussian rulers claimed legal ownership of the material under the law known as Bernsteinregal (regalian right to amber),11 the claim that carved ambers be seen as the emblem of Prussian culture—a type of art always pointing to its inherent Prussianness—is nonetheless not supported by early modern written sources. Archival documents that record amber gifts from Prussian patrons point to diplomatic expediency, but they do not tell us anything specific about why this material was used, other than that it appeared in such documents frequently enough to indicate a certain popularity of carved ambers among Europe’s elites. The Prussian origin of the material may have been implied, but it was not explicitly declared.
Drawing on recent studies on art’s materiality, how its physical qualities were sensed, interpreted and understood, this article turns to amber’s affective valences and physical qualities to examine this medium’s ambivalent connection to the place of its extraction and facture.12 Prussian artisans, as will become evident, seldom showcased the Prussianness of their objects, instead preferring a more open-ended approach that left interpretation of origins to the beholder—often undercutting assumptions about the provenience of the material. This attitude in itself is nothing unusual, as early modern collectors of what we would now term ‘decorative arts’ had not yet organized their artworks by so-called ‘national schools’, which anchored objects’ origins in a particular place.13 In the case of Heise’s nautilus cup, through a witty conflation of the object’s design and form shaped by the material’s affordances, amber’s physical properties in its raw, unpolished state, and the resource’s well-known extraction from the southern Baltic shore, the maker may have alluded to the artefact’s association with Prussia, but—as this article contends—this association would never entrench the work’s geographical framing.
As I have argued elsewhere, Prussia was not the only pertinent locus of amber’s cultural valence. The example of Tuscany can illustrate the point. While Florentine patrons and humanists recognized amber as a Prussian export, the material was believed to be simultaneously Tuscan, owing to its identification as a local resource in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a classical poem popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.14 In his account of amber’s origins, Ovid invokes the Heliades, daughters of the sun-god Helios, whose tears shed for their deceased brother Phaethon (who was also Helios’s child) were transformed into the lustrous substance we now call amber. The material was then scattered along the banks of the river Eridanus, widely associated with the Po in early modernity.15 At once radiant, lucid, limpid and fiery, amber was thus believed to mimic the material qualities of both water and the sun. As a multivalent medium, it could convey both the mythical solar origins recounted by Ovid and its actual harvesting from the Prussian littoral. Sometimes, as in the Tuscan case, however, one of these associations would be marginalized for political and cultural reasons. This potential cognitive dissonance alone suggests a tension between an interest in loading amber artefacts with specific geographical references and producing artefacts appealing to international collectors, in tune with the popularity of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, natural philosophy and material mimesis—the last of which implies that one type of matter takes after characteristics of another. If amber was a multivalent medium that could fit into many different artistic geographies, how exactly could this multivalence take hold over the claims to locating the material within the specific bounds of Prussia, a strategy discernible in Friedrich Wilhelm giving Heise’s nautilus cup to Johann Georg II? This article tackles this conundrum.
In exploring amber’s multiple geographical valences, I take as my working premise that although objects made from the material were not entirely open-ended in terms of their perceived origins, their makers attempted to make these artefacts as open-ended as possible, thus ensuring their wider trans-European appeal. Carved ambers and their effects were loaded with cultural significance, but that meaning was historically contingent and interrelated with artefacts’ materiality, which signified differently in different parts of Europe. Paradoxically, then, although in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries amber put Prussia on an artistic map, Prussianness was not embedded by design in the artefacts made from the material, neither through subject matter nor iconography. Rather than locating amber’s geographical scope or fixing its meaning, the Prussian masters engaged in the material exploration of the medium’s physical composition, showing their ingenuity by linking carved ambers with classical tradition, rhetoric and natural philosophy, rendering amber-made objects more marketable as a result. While obfuscating the geographical origins of amber, the hermeneutic ambiguity of Prussian artefacts facilitated their inclusion in the trans-European circuit of art, as these objects were not beholden to any specific interpretation. The purpose of this article is, therefore, to chart a new way of addressing amber’s artistic geography that celebrates the material’s supra-European remit.
Although amber was a Prussian natural resource, Prussian thinkers and artists were not in the position to encode the origins of the material as an integral element of the artefact’s meaning. Constituting a relatively small subgroup within a wider material community of amber cognoscenti, collectors and makers dispersed across Europe, Prussian artisans resisted the allure of geographical determinism in their treatment of the material. In so doing, they recognized the medium’s multivalence and ambiguity and, effectively, opened up the scope of artistic geography beyond the site of creation. Attentiveness to this dialogic intercourse between materiality and geography—evident, for example in Heise’s open-ended use of material properties and semantic valences of amber—was in line with wider European trends.16 The region’s artistic entanglement with the rest of the Continent thus calls into question the usual relegation of Prussian art and material culture to the margins of art-historical study, suggesting instead that Prussia was a vibrant centre of cultural activity and material exploration, a home to artists able to successfully cater to foreign collectors’ tastes. What follows is an invitation to think about amber’s materiality as a culturally signifying expression unto itself, regionally variable and hence lending itself to an inclusive approach that integrates artistically lesser-known regions like Prussia into the study of art.
I. Geographies of Amber
Most early modern carved ambers in European cabinets of curiosities were produced in the largest Prussian cities, including Danzig (Gdańsk), Elbing (Elbląg) and Königsberg.17 Königsberg, the capital city of the duchy of Prussia, was the main site of amber artisanship in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.18 Danzig, the largest and wealthiest town of Royal Prussia, overtook its rival in the mid-seventeenth century as the main production centre.19 Amber is recorded in gifts made by the Danzig burgomasters to Polish kings and foreign dignitaries when the city magistrates wanted to impress their guests. The material had high monetary value, no doubt, but the real reason to choose it over the more frequently gifted silver or gold, which could easily be monetized, was its non-fungibility.20 Amber was a better choice when the object was meant to outlive the moment of diplomatic exchange, putting down roots in a place where it was not made.
We see such motivations in the gifts made by the Hohenzollerns (rulers of Ducal Prussia) and the Polish-Lithuanian Vasas (overlords of Ducal Prussia until 1657 and sovereigns in Royal Prussia), who used amber extensively in diplomatic affairs, linking this prized material to their territories.21 Both ruling families claimed ownership of all amber found within their borders.22 The Hohenzollerns were particularly assertive in laying this claim, and the role of amber in their diplomatic gift-giving has been the subject of several monographs.23 One such gift was Heise’s nautilus cup described above; another: the celebrated amber chandelier given to the Medici by Johann Sigismund, elector of Brandenburg (r. 1608–1619), regent (1611–1618) and later duke of Prussia (r. 1618/19).24 A strategic placement of a Prussian artefact in a collection belonging to one of the most visited courts of Europe may have been intended to direct attention to Prussian ingenuity, promoting the inventiveness of the region’s artists. The chandelier was indeed given pride of place in the Medici Tribuna, where it was noticed by visitors, including traveller and tutor to the English nobility Richard Lassels (c.1603–1668) and polymath Johann Georg Keyssler (1693–1743); the latter was visiting roughly a hundred years after the chandelier was presented to the Medici but was still aware of its status as a gift from the Brandenburg court.25
Other sources, too, point to competition between Brandenburg and Polish courts over who was a more consummate patron of amber. For example, Severin Göbel the Younger (1569–1627), professor at Königsberg’s Albertina university and court physician to Albrecht Friedrich, duke of Prussia (r. 1568–1618), writes about a frog trapped in amber, so unusual that Sigismund III Vasa of Poland and Lithuania (r. 1587–1632) attempted to procure it from the Danzig-based amber merchant Andreas Jaski. Despite the high price offered by Sigismund, Jaski sold the frog to Georg Friedrich I, margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach (r. 1543–1603) and regent of Prussia (1578–1603), who in turn presented it to Vincenzo I Gonzaga, duke of Mantua (r. 1587–1612), who gladly placed the object in his treasure room (Schatzkammer).26 Göbel is clearly biased in favour of the Hohenzollerns, as he fashions them as amber’s supreme connoisseurs, but perhaps against his intention he simultaneously admits that amber artefacts were meant to fit into many different artistic geographies: the frog trapped in amber would be equally at home in Danzig, Königsberg, Warsaw and Mantua. It is then not surprising that amber featured prominently in Hohenzollern gift-giving, including the documented instances of objects sent to Vienna, Versailles, Copenhagen and even Moscow.27
Gifts of amber procured by the Polish-Lithuanian Vasas have not been systematically studied, but what we know seems to follow a similar pattern. An epic poem by Samuel Twardowski, first published in 1633 and based on the 1622 legation of Prince Krzysztof Zbaraski (1580–1627), ambassador of Sigismund III to Constantinople, describes several amber gifts presented to Sultan Osman II (r. 1618–1622) and his high dignitaries, among them a mirror in amber frame and amber tableware ‘incomparable to anything else in Europe’.28 Other documented gifts include diplomatic exchanges with Moscow and Florence.29 The Vasas were themselves noted collectors of amber, and some of these objects have survived. One of them, a bowl in the Munich Residenz (Fig. 2) is traditionally ascribed to the hand of Sigismund III. This attribution relies on the inclusion of the Polish White Eagle with the Vasa sheaf on its breast that adorns the lower side of the bowl’s lid. Sigismund III reportedly carved amber himself, which adds credence to the theory.30 Alternatively, the object may have been a gift for the king commissioned by a courtier in Danzig or Königsberg, not unlike an amber chessboard at Wawel Castle which contains the arms of both the king and his courtier Hieronim Wołowicz; the inscription, otii causa |domino svo| servvs dedicat (for entertainment, to my lord your servant dedicates) secures the interpretation of the artefact as a token of courtly clientage.31 Whatever its original use, the amber at the Schatzkammer in Munich also became a gift, as it was likely given in dowry to Sigismund’s daughter Princess Anna Catherine Constance Vasa, who took it to Neuburg in 1642. Her collection was later transferred to Munich, when the descendants of her husband, Philipp Wilhelm, from a junior Wittelsbach branch, ascended the throne of Bavaria, in 1777.32 In this case, the object was not valued for its Prussianness but served as a dynastic prop and a family heirloom reminding the princess of her late father. If anything, for the Vasa princess it stood for Warsaw rather than for Danzig or Königsberg.
Danzig or Königsberg workshop, Amber bowl of Sigismund III, 1590s. Amber and ivory. Detail of the lower side of the lid with the Polish White Eagle. Munich, Schatzkammer, Inv. ResMüSch. 522. Source: © Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung.
Both the Hohenzollerns and the Vasas could expect some familiarity across Europe with the place of amber’s sourcing. Prussia’s status as the home of amber was being popularized by poetry, naturalist publications and, in particular, cartography.33 An oft-reproduced map by Caspar Henneberg (Fig. 3), first published in 1576, marks the western coast of Sambia (German: Samland—the peninsula northwest of Königsberg) with the inscription Flante zephyro hic multum Succini coligitur (when the western wind blows, multitude of amber gathers here), while the northern coast is marked as Borea Flante hic Succinum coligitur (when the wind blows from the north, amber gathers here). The message is clear: amber is from Prussia. This was the most detailed map of the region to date, but in terms of marking Sambia as an amber-rich destination, Henneberg continued the tradition established by Olaus Magnus’s Carta marina, first published in Venice in 1539, which clearly locates amber (marked as succinum) in Sambia; it also describes the adjacent Vistula Spit as ripa succini (amber coast). The image was then repeated in Heinrich Zell’s map of Prussia of 1542, and copied widely by Sebastian Münster, Abraham Ortelius, Willem Blaeu and other cartographers, making the designation of the Sambian Peninsula as ‘amber coast’ the norm in European map-making.34 In John Speed’s atlas of 1631, for example, Prussia is described as the ‘great store of Amber, a juyce growing like Correll in a mountaine of the North Sea, which is cleane covered with water, and cast up by violence of the waves into their Havens’.35 This cartographical convention took so great a hold that the English physician George Ent (1604–1689) was genuinely surprised when the Rome-based connoisseur and naturalist Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588–1657) informed him about a recent uncovering of amber in Italy, so far away from the Baltic Sea.36
Map of Prussia after Caspar Henneberg’s map, printed by Willem Blaeu in 1645. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
One reason why Ent was surprised is because early modern naturalist treatises emphasize amber’s Baltic extraction. The Saxon naturalist Georgius Agricola (German: Georg Bauer; 1494–1555), to give a prominent example, asserts that although ‘many Greeks’ believed that amber was generated on the shores of the Po River as a hardened resin of poplar, these people were mainly poets and so their conviction could easily be rejected.37 This claim was reinforced by the Königsberg-based physicians Andreas Aurifaber (1514–1559) and Severin Göbel the Elder (1530–1612), who wrote some of the most comprehensive treatises on amber, which in turn inspired numerous other accounts that stressed the Baltic origin of the material.38 To some degree, these books were based on classical accounts embracing and even emulating Pliny’s and Tacitus’s stories of the gathering of amber on Baltic seashores. In Book 37 of the Historia naturalis—on gemstones—Pliny asserts that the material is a product of ‘islands in the northern ocean’ (the Baltic Sea).39 Tacitus, in De Germania (ad 98), reports that these lands were inhabited by the Aestii people, who gather amber washed up by the sea.40 Scholars serving the interests of the Polish court repeated this information even as they drew different conclusions from it. Thus, historian Szymon Starowolski (1588–1656) describes amber as one of the most important exports of the land—this remark occurs in a section on ‘wealth’ in his history of the Polish kingdom, first published in 1632.41 Therefore, for him the material is Polish because Prussia is a part of Poland.42 Starowolski’s appropriation of amber for Poland is somewhat unconventional, but in its attempt to embed the material in a specific place and its history, it is typical, especially in that mineral wealth was ever more closely related to statecraft in the period. This geographical determinism would take on a particularly dramatic form in the early twentieth century, when art historians like Otto Pelka and Alfred Rohde pronounced the material to be not only Prussian but also quintessentially German.43 Following the end of the Second World War and the transfer of Danzig from Germany to Poland, similar ethnonationalist claims were made by Polish scholars who framed amber as a matter of national heritage.44
In the early modern period, however, few savants would have subscribed to a single theory of amber’s origins. The Bolognese naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605), for example, distinguishes between Baltic and other ambers from across the world, including Italy, Spain and even China.45 For him, although the Prussian variety remained best known, other sourcing sites were equally worthy of mention. This led him to assert that because it could be sourced locally, amber was an Italian material. Even the Prussian Aurifaber enumerates different sorts of amber not sourced from the Baltic, including the Hungarian, Italian and Scottish types.46 In listing a wider range of possible geographical variations of the material, he still favours the Prussian type and dedicates most of his treatise (Succini historia, 1551) to it, but he nonetheless acknowledges the existence of alternative deposits, if only to stress the superiority of Prussian amber. Thus, from the range of evidence available, scholars were aware of amber’s multiple geographies, and experts like Aldrovandi and Göbel were adamant that the material existed beyond Prussia, even though the Prussian variety was the one they knew best.
While no claims were made about amber’s national ambit in early modernity, a heated debate ensued about what kind of material it was. This exploration of physical properties, composition and affordances is important to understanding early modern geographical framings of amber, as scholars compiled classical accounts and tested their validity against inductive experiments, engaging with the material world. Thus, in marked contradiction to Pliny and Tacitus, who had both flagged amber as derivative of tree resin, naturalists like Agricola, Aurifaber and Göbel pronounced it to be a bituminous substance, claiming for it a resemblance to other substances such as tar, camphor and petroleum. Agricola believed that amber was ‘an oily juice of the earth’, a type of asphalt (bitumen), an umbrella term spanning sticky, highly viscous liquid and solid substances such as naphtha, petroleum, camphor and jet.47 This bituminous reading of amber was embraced especially by the scholars who foregrounded the Prussian variety in their investigations.
But for those who could not recognize the physical and olfactory qualities associated with bitumen in amber, its materiality often served as an incentive to highlight alternative geographies of the material’s sourcing. Failing to sense petroleum in amber, the botanist Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1501–1578) preferred to trust the authority of Aristotle, Pliny and Tacitus, who believed amber to be a resinous substance.48 His Della materia medicinale (Venice, 1544) is a translation of and critical commentary on De materia medica (c. ad 50–70) by the ancient Greek pharmacologist Dioscorides, who maintained that amber is hardened poplar resin to be found on the banks of the Po.49 Mattioli took this clue seriously but ultimately thought resin exuded by pines to be the source of amber. This deduction was based on amber’s olfactory qualities, as for Mattioli the material smelled like pine (‘il manifesto odore del pino’) and therefore must have originated from this tree.50 In tracing down the possible origins of amber, he explicitly referenced the story of the Heliades, those nymphs whose tears of grief, Ovid records, transmuted into resin and then amber.51 Admittedly, Mattioli does not rely on Ovid (who in fact does not mention the tree species by name); the early modern scholar complies with the authority of Theophrastus, who like Mattioli was a botanist. He nonetheless uses Ovid’s storytelling as a pretext for his naturalist investigation. And once the arboreal theory of amber was in place, Ovid’s poetic description of the creation of the prized resource became a useful shorthand for those who wanted to locate amber outside Prussia.52 Thus, the material could be anchored in a geography altogether different from the place of its origin.
II. Amber’s Self-Reflexivity
The Ovidian story of the material’s transfigurative design infused amber artefacts with self-reflexive rhetoric, which spoke to erudite patrons and collectors across Europe, helping sustain a material community of amber connoisseurs and enthusiasts. In acknowledgment of Ovid’s trans-European appeal, Prussian artists working in amber often featured scenes from the myth of the Heliades as an iconographical motif, but without pointing to any specific origins of the material. Take, for example, a backgammon board at the Victoria and Albert Museum (Fig. 4), made in Königsberg in the first half of the seventeenth century. The Ovidian storyline features prominently in the design of the piece, serving as a catalyst for thinking about the object’s purpose. In the centre of the board are six pierced white-amber vignettes set against a dark background, depicting scenes from the myth of Phaethon, the Heliades’ brother who died a tragic death crashing Helios’s sun-chariot. One of the vignettes depicts the Heliades’ metamorphosis; another a grove of poplars, the trees described in early modern translations of Ovid as the corollary of the Heliades’ shapeshifting.53 Representation of the myth is in this context embodied in the material in which the artefact is expressed. Amber reliefs provide a rich golden surface across which the (now lost) checkers—likely also made of amber—would glide. Ovidian figures are perceptible in the vignettes, as if encased in the material like the many fossilized insects and small animals which entertained the imagination of poets like Martial, who wrote several oft-referenced ekphrases of amber inclusions.54 This choice of subject matter is a witty employment of the material’s physical features, inciting a dialogue between nature and artifice—the material in its natural state and the artist’s impression of it. It is not necessary to know where the artefact was made to appreciate the erudite overtones of the work. The mirroring of sensory affordances and iconography, both of which self-reflexively point to amber’s materiality, would be enough to market the artwork successfully among the elite network of European patrons, collectors and art agents.
Königsberg workshop, Backgammon board, c.1608–1647 (made), 1968 (restored). Amber on ebonized wood support with metal hinges. 31 x 61.9 x 3.5 cm. London, Victoria and Albert Museum, A.11-1950, given by Dr W. L. Hildburgh FSA. Source: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
An elegant artefact, the Ovidian-themed backgammon board made in amber was likely designed as a moralizing lesson about restraint and moderation. Backgammon depends on chance and was historically a game commonly associated with gambling parlours. This use could be seen in early modern European paintings by Adriaen van Ostade, David Teniers the Younger and Le Nain brothers in which we see young gullible men, seductive women and unscrupulous ruffians partaking in the game for profit.55 There were variants of the game, not all of which would necessarily be used in the context of gambling, especially those like sbaraiaonum that were described as ‘the game of princes’.56 The V&A backgammon board is likely one such variant, and the story of Phaethon which it contains is probably meant to remind the user to keep their cool and not to get carried away like Phaethon did, with dire consequences. The object thus explicitly uses Ovid as a warning to rationalize the user’s behaviour. So much in theory; the very fact that the iconography of the board attempts to keep the users in check suggests that emotions often ran high at playtime. The board was meant to serve as an index of Ovid, but whether it did so is unverifiable. What is likely the case, though, is that the reference to Ovid and its playful evocation of amber’s materiality—its radiance, translucence and metamorphic constitution—facilitated the inclusion of Prussian objects in the trans-European circuit of art and design. Prussian amber artisans knew exactly how to employ amber’s material properties and cultural valences in their artistic production to make it internationally desirable.
A similar marketing strategy may have been employed by Heise in the nautilus cup which opens this essay. Made from slates of Baltic amber fitted together with a silver-gilt mount, it displays the refined workmanship typical of the Königsberg artistic milieu in its heyday. Yet the classicizing ornament aligns this object with a broader international audience. Although it is a Prussian object, its aquatic iconography does not need to denote the Baltic Sea, and it is improbable that it was intended to convey any such narrow meaning. The caryatids in the shape of sea nymphs adorning the sides and the foot of the object are a case in point. They could be seen as reminiscent of figureheads on sailing ships, in which case they may have evoked the maritime region of Prussia where the object was made. But given amber’s customary association with Ovid and its status as a metamorphic material, beholders may have also interpreted them as the Heliades. Whatever the possible gamut of interpretations, the figure of a naked woman turning into amber became a popular visual topos in the decoration of Prussian amber vessels, suggesting the motif’s prevalence. Alfred Rohde in his seminal monograph Bernstein: ein deutscher Werkstoff (Amber: A German Material, 1937) reproduces almost forty vessels of this kind.57 In all cases, female bodies merge in with the background, evoking the metamorphic character of the material from which the artefact is made. The caryatids embracing the edges and limits of artworks and buildings were an iconographical motif appearing in materials ranging from gold and marble to coral and wood, but considering their possible Ovidian reading, these female figures may have evoked different hermeneutics when expressed in amber. If we agree, as I suggest here, that Heise carved these multivalent, open-ended bodies to be filled in with interpretation by the beholder, then they might be seen as both amber-made figures in bas-relief and mythological characters associated with the creation of the material, as both the index of metamorphosis and a representation of it.
Heise’s nautilus cup is above all an artefact that demands engagement; to borrow an expression from Shira Brisman, who has ingeniously described similar open-ended objects from Central Europe, it is ‘an image that wants to be read and interpreted’.58 While the Ovidian reference embeds Heise’s ornamental vessel in a topos of transformation, the nautical design reinforces the naturalist appeal of the work, supporting its correlation with the nautilus, an actual product of the sea rather than a story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. A profiled, multipart bar made of opaque amber forms the edge of the cup, calling to mind gilded silver mounts often seen in ornamental vessels made of naturally occurring nautilus shell. Different kinds of material metonymy are hence latently elicited by Heise’s artwork: the Ovidian metamorphosis of the Heliades’ tears into amber nodules, the intermedial substitution of mollusc shell with shell-like amber plate, and the replacement of gilded bar with amber that imitates its shape, a translation from one medium to another. Heise clearly treats amber as a material that keeps beholders engaged, courting them to discover the medium’s multiple allusions and connotations. The nautilus cup references literary classics, but also its own materiality, stimulating the intellect, activating a free flow of associations, provoking curiosity about the ingenuity of the artist, all the while framing Prussia as an eminent centre of amber craftsmanship (but without claiming the material for it). The most crucial aspect of marketing Prussian carved ambers across Europe was to link them to the interests of erudite patrons and collectors, particularly via references to classical philology and early modern pansophic explorations of matter. The existence of this material community of amber appreciators scattered across Europe provided a convenient means of boosting sales without limiting the symbolic valence of the material to Prussia.
How exactly users would interact with Heise’s cup is an open-ended question. Nautilus-shaped goblets were primarily enjoyed as display objects in a cabinet of curiosities (Kunstkammer), but on special occasions they may have been employed as representative drinking vessels, a custom observed on the day of the signing of the Peace of Westphalia which ended the Thirty Years War in 1648.59 Although there is no written document that would lay out early modern users’ thoughts on amber’s valences in art, the discussion of the material available in other sources, particularly naturalist tracts and classical poetry (as we have already seen), allows for reconstructing an array of potential interpretative arcs. Thus, liquid inside the vessel may have increased the nautilus cup’s aquatic appeal; it may have brought up associations with the Heliades’ tears and therefore Ovid while evoking debates on resinous and bituminous origins of the material. Given this mix of possible leads and associations, it is unlikely that amber was chosen at random in the design of the piece.
The choice of medium for an art object often derived from the material’s physical attributes. In acknowledgment of this material allure of craftwork, my close reading of amber’s affective valences is in part inspired by the recent turn to materiality in Art History (and its cognate fields), which acknowledges that artistic media have properties and affordances that shape human subjectivity and activity.60 The defining characteristic of the new material studies, first expressed in the work of anthropologists and philosophers like Bruno Latour, Alfred Gell, Jane Bennett and Graham Harman, is that things should not be dismissed as inert lumps of matter waiting to be acted upon by thinking human agents.61 When objects and artefacts come embedded with a polysemy of multiple meanings that, in turn, shape users’ experience of interacting with them in multisensory and affective relations, they are better described as ‘things’—material forms with the capacity to act upon the world.62 Meaning of materials is relational, multidirectional and, most importantly, dependent on the individual circumstance of each case, even if craftspeople attempted to manipulate the affordances of matter. Take amber’s luminosity. Chandeliers and candlesticks were often made in this material (Fig. 5) in recognition of its sheen and lucid transparency in interplay with light. The radiant properties of amber would intensify in contact with the sun and artificial light, making it a particularly suitable material for ornamental light fixtures. Precisely for these reasons, early modern thinkers including the Florentine humanist Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) and the German polymath Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535) classified amber as a ‘solar’ substance.63 In this affordance-matching typology, the material took after the qualities of the celestial body it betokened, as it was believed to radiate vitality and ward off evil forces.
Königsberg workshop, Candlestick, early seventeenth century. Turned yellow amber; cast chased and gilded silver. Florence, Palazzo Pitti, Tesoro dei Granduchi, inv. 2/ Ambre Bargello 1878. Source: photograph courtesy of Gallerie degli Uffizi.
The list of correspondences with the sun continues when one adds the Heliades to the mix, nymphs turned amber-makers who were, as all readers of Ovid would have known, daughters of the Sun. Solar deities, the Heliades were a nexus of material signs correlated with their bodies, setting up an array of similitudes between illumination and reflection, source of light and its receptor, brightness and translucence. Ovid mentions three Heliades by name, each name containing the ideas of sunlight: Phoibe was ‘bright’, Lampetia ‘shining’ and Phaethousa ‘radiant’.64 A chandelier or a candlestick did not serve merely as referent of the Ovidian fable as if art-making and story-telling were suspended in the realm of phantasmagoria; engagement with the object could test the story’s basis in material reality. Placing a carved amber piece against a source of light, one might link the material’s luminosity and radiance to the Ovidian narrative, which connects amber to the Sun. The material would then, in turn, prompt beholders to think of a myth that unfolded not only in their memory but also in contact with the material that brought the myth to life. The meaning of amber in this context thereby oscillated between the affordances of the material, the Ovidian myth, the naturalist discourse, the space of display, the beholder and the object itself.
As Ulinka Rublack has convincingly argued, uses and perceptions of matter, texture and form, how objects were perceived and gained significance, helped establish contexts in which artefacts took on meaning.65 Far from acting as a passive receptor of predetermined form, the object’s materiality partook in the process of signification, moving between external and internal contexts.66 In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, even after the process of transformation, the qualities of the original material are retained, essentially comprising an index of the former self.67 The tears of the daughters of the Sun thus metamorphosed into luminous nodules of hardened resin, mirroring the Heliades’ solar lineage. If amber chandeliers could evoke an Ovidian theme, it is because the maker paid ample attention to amber’s physical attributes. Its solar connotations derived from a classification system based on similitude, where natural materials were understood as relating to one another through broadly defined correspondences and resemblances.68 It was through the physical properties of things that such resemblance was established, and amber’s association with the sun was based on its material traits, including translucence, shiny appearance and flammability. Fittingly, amber and the solar deities the Heliades were endowed with similar qualities and affordances. Historical debates on amber’s ontological status reveal that materials have properties—for example, amber’s colour evoking the sun—that affect how users think about them.
Hanneke Grootenboer has recently proposed that many images and artefacts are a form of thinking, ‘capable of offering us a thought rather than a meaning or a narrative’.69 They trigger reflection rather than simply announcing narratives or messages. Considering the form of amber artefacts examined in this article, it is hard to disagree. These objects were designed to feed the imaginations of the user, generating a discursive space where the myth of amber’s metamorphic origin informs the artefact’s form, and where the artefact’s form in turn strengthens the appeal of the myth, soliciting the user into active involvement with the medium. To get down to amber’s materiality is thus to participate in what Martin Heidegger calls ‘thinging’, a process of moving beyond reference, of losing control over the object’s or material’s meaning.70 It ought to be clear by now that amber’s self-reflexivity was as much a cultural construct as it was encoded in material qualities. Apart from being a physical substance, amber was also a discourse, a totality of the acquired tastes and perceptions that enabled one to make the material signs, such as colour and shine, speak and to unravel their meaning. Such material hermeneutics operated in a world of tangible amber artefacts, affecting their use, reception and signification through dialogue with the lived experience of beholders. The artists and patrons who enjoyed the feel, look, scent and narrative potential of carved ambers appreciated them not for any fixed meaning, but precisely because their meaning was fluid and open-ended and, therefore, could travel across the Continent. What follows is an exploration of how Prussian artists employed material affordances of amber in designing artefacts that would prove highly desirable among European collectors, forging a material community of art collectors built around a specific artistic medium.
III. Amber’s Appeal
As Fernand Braudel made clear, material alone does not determine everything.71 A material may be selected because of its association with a region, because it stands out due to its value, because of its material qualities or symbolic valences. With amber, the lack of fixed meaning might have been an advantage for artists and patrons on the relative periphery of the emerging European art system who were attempting to fit into the rules of the game. Largely absent from monographic surveys of European art and material culture, Prussian carved ambers were highly sought-after additions to elite collections.72 For clues as to why these objects were so popular, take the portable altarpiece at the Palazzo Pitti (Fig. 6) made by the Königsberg-based artist Georg Schreiber (d. 1644). Signed and dated 1614, this ornate artefact is made of amber plates of opaque, translucent and milky variants installed on a wooden core.73 The object simulates the façade of a multi-storey classical building, with the themes of Annunciation in the centre and the Holy Cross flanked by Mary and John at the top. The pedestal is adorned with the theme of Flagellation, the predella with the Last Supper, the pediment with the Entombment, and a medallion with the Deposition is contained in the frieze, which also serves as the base for the Holy Cross. These New Testament scenes are placed in pierced translucent amber vignettes set on horn.
Georg Schreiber, Portable altarpiece, 1614. Amber of different varieties, turned, carved, gilded, engraved and painted; gilded silver; molten and gilded metal; carved wood. 57.5 x 20 x 18.5 cm. Florence, Palazzo Pitti, Tesoro dei Granduchi, inv. 75/ Ambre Bargello 1878. Source: photograph courtesy of Gallerie degli Uffizi.
The object is inventive but not unfamiliar. Similar-looking altarpieces were rendered in different media, including wood, ivory and silver. But because Schreiber’s artefact is made in amber, the material’s intrinsic qualities carry specific connotations altering the meaning of the artwork. While in other media the vignettes depicting figures from the New Testament would primarily serve a narrative function subordinate to the meaning of the work as a whole, in amber—because they seem encased in the material—they could additionally connote the many fossilized insects and small animals trapped in amber that were eagerly collected by European connoisseurs and naturalists.74 Or, they may have conveyed forged amber inclusions, into which the little animal would be inserted by means of the maker’s artifice. In fact, the technique of hollowing out an amber nodule, setting in an insect or an amphibian and then gluing the pieces back together would be similar to the technique used by Schreiber in the vignettes.75 As a Prussian, Schreiber may have been familiar with the work of a fellow Prussian, Daniel Hermann, whose poem De rana et lacerta succino prussiaco insitis (On the Frog and the Lizard Ingrained in Prussian Amber), published in Cracow in 1583, was entirely dedicated to animal inclusions, as the title suggests.76 This poem is a panegyric to the Prussian material and a contemplation on intersections between nature and artifice.77 The frontispiece depicts the eponymous frog and lizard trapped in amber (Fig. 7), giving the reader the gist of the poem and its inspiration from the classical poet Martial, who wrote several epigrams employing the trope of the animal encased in the translucent material.
Anonymous, frontispiece to Daniel Hermann, De Rana et Lacerta, Cracow, 1583. Source: SLUB Dresden/ Digital Collections/ Lit.Lat.rec.A.380, misc.23.
Both Hermann and Martial are explicit in their reference to the myth of the Heliades. To give voice to Martial:
In the bright tear Phaëton’s sister shed
A bee is seen, as in its nectar dead.
Its many toils have earned a guerdon high,
In such a tomb a bee might wish to die.78
Part of the ekphrasis tradition, the epigram may have been inspired by the cerebration of such fossils at the villa of one of Martial’s patrons.79 Likening the unfortunate bee with Phaethon’s demise, Martial draws on amber’s long-held associations with death. The ancient Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily had already made this link clear, as he reported that the material was ‘commonly used in connection with the mourning attending the death of the young’.80 The poem’s use of funerary language touches on both amber and death, making for an apt reference point for Schreiber’s portable altar, which draws attention to the suffering, death and resurrection of Christ. The altarpiece is a subsidiary prop of transubstantiation: bread and wine laid on a portable altar placed opposite would become the Body and Blood of Christ. Amber, itself a metamorphic material, is therefore a suitable medium for adding symbolic depth to such an object. The artist’s ingenuity in turning a conventional artefact into an erudite game of associations likely added to its appeal at the Medici court, where the object was first recorded in 1616.81
Schreiber’s altarpiece may have been a gift to Maria Maddalena of Austria (1589–1631), wife of Cosimo II, from her sister Constance of Austria (1605–1631), queen of Poland and grand duchess of Lithuania, who was the consort of the already mentioned Sigismund III.82 Drawing from the Medici alliance with the Vasas, historian of the Medici collections Kirsten Aschengreen Piacenti suggested that many carved ambers in Florence were originally commissioned by the Polish-Lithuanian ruling family.83 Although Schreiber’s altarpiece was of Prussian facture, its meaning in the grand-ducal city was mediated by the artefact’s status as a gift from an allied court, as well as its suitability to fit trans-European tastes. Schreiber’s ingenuity facilitated the object’s translation from the Prussian context of its production to the Tuscan environment of its reception.
Playing with conventional forms and turning them into something new was a skill expected from early modern European artists, especially those who wished to be successful. The quality of being clever and inventive by reorchestrating otherwise conventional tropes and themes had a purchase in most European languages—ingenium in Latin, ingegno in Italian, Gemüt or Sinn in German—implying that prominent artists were encouraged to think internationally about their work.84 The idea of ingenuity stems from classical rhetoric, where ingenium is identified as one’s ability to generate copia, that is, to find the suitable subject-matter for oratory.85 The Latin copia stands for abundance or plenty, and so copying in this respect describes not imitation but rather one’s knowledge of wider artistic schema and precedents, of how to rework them in a creative way, composing something unexpected from components that had already existed.86 Revealing sharp wit, fine skill and swift execution, ingenuity could also manifest itself in the deep knowledge of materials, of how to employ them in one’s work to demonstrate inventiveness.87 For scholars of materiality Pamela Smith and Glenn Adamson, the intelligence of making resides not solely in the mind of the craftsperson but somewhere in the kinetic interface between mind, body, tools and materials.88 Thus, to combine in a new way old artistic and literary forms, artists like Schreiber needed to tap into amber’s ability to showcase its materiality as a form of playful thinking that could lead the beholder to noticing and imagining something unseen or new. These concerns were not local but European, allowing Prussian artists to cater to an international audience.
Of the four early modern amber masters whose artworks are either signed or could be traced to signed preparatory drawings and are preserved in relatively high numbers in today’s collections, two were active in Königsberg, Jacob Heise and Georg Schreiber, and two in Danzig, Michael Redlin (1669–1688) and Christoph Maucher (1642–1706). Little is known about the origins of the first three, but it is certain that Maucher was not Prussian by birth. Born in Schwäbisch Gmünd and therefore of Swabian heritage, he belonged to a large group of newcomers attempting to obtain citizenship in Prussia’s largest city. He did not succeed in this pursuit and remained a journeyman (Wanderkünstler) throughout his life, albeit a highly successful one. Although he collaborated with several Danzig guild masters, his competitors filed various court cases against him, demanding that he be banned from taking commissions in the city. Yet the magistrates rejected these demands, allowing Maucher to remain in the city and likely appreciating the business he generated.89 During court proceedings, Maucher’s competitors grumbled that he thought of himself too highly, as the best master in the whole of Europe, while—they claimed—he had been forced to leave Copenhagen and Vienna penniless in rough circumstances and ended up in Danzig only because he was unwelcome in Paris.90 These references are clearly intended as a slur, but they simultaneously acknowledge Maucher’s pan-European network of clients and connections. It is possible that he thought of himself as a Danziger, as he spent over thirty years in the Baltic metropolis, but to call him (and his work) Prussian in the narrow sense would be a counterproductive anachronism.
IV. Amber’s Interconnected Geographies
What emerges from this study is an image of Prussia as a vibrant centre of cultural activity and material exploration, a home to artists able to cater to foreign collectors’ tastes. Amber-made artefacts were polyvalent media capable of evoking multiple geographical locations, as they had the power to simultaneously publicize and obfuscate the origins of the material from which they were made. To fully appreciate this multifaceted aspect of amber, its ability to connect seemingly remote and disparate places, consider one final piece, the reliquary of Saint Casimir in the Palazzo Pitti (Fig. 8). Sent in October 1678 to Cosimo III, grand duke of Tuscany (r. 1670–1723), as a gift from Mikołaj Stefan Pac (c.1626–1684), bishop of Vilnius, the artefact was part of a mutual exchange of relics designed to build a political alliance between the two men.91 The Paces were at the time competing with other aristocratic dynasties, especially the Radziwiłłs, the Sapiehas and the Olshanskis, over influence and authority in the grand duchy of Lithuania, and an association with the House of Medici promised to elevate the family in the pecking order of the country.92 The association with the Medici was partially undergirded by the Lithuanian nobility’s alleged descent from fugitives escaping the turmoil of the ancient Roman Empire, an origins narrative popular in the period.93 In support of this account, Mikołaj Stefan received the relics of Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi from Cosimo, a calculated move given that the Paces claimed the Pazzi for their relatives, as the two names are near homonyms.94 On his part, Mikołaj Stefan was strengthening his connection with the Medici by delivering the relics of the Lithuanian saint to Cosimo in an amber casket. The choice of amber for a reliquary seems logical considering its funerary associations discussed above. Pac may have also understood the high status the material enjoyed in Florence, and as a Lithuanian magnate he had easy access to the best amber workshops in Danzig. But although it was made in (Royal) Prussia, the object itself makes no claims to such origins.95
Danzig workshop, Reliquary of Saint Casimir, c.1677/78; several different varieties of turned and carved amber; carved wood; cast and engraved silver; carved ivory; gilded metal. 35 x 56 x 20 cm. Florence, Palazzo Pitti, Tesoro dei Granduchi, inv. 77/ Ambre Bargello 1878. Source: photograph courtesy of Gallerie degli Uffizi.
As Ruth Sargent Noyes has suggested, the reliquary’s design instead points to its status as a medium of transcultural exchange.96 The rectangular-shaped object is made up of a wooden core entirely covered on the outside with thin amber plates of different varieties. The body, supported by four feet in the shape of orbs, has two doors on the front with surfaces accentuated by twisted columns on the edges and a pair of bishops at the centre. These figures are likely a reference to the donor, Mikołaj Stefan Pac. The gift recipient, Cosimo III, is also implied, as the central portions of the doors are decorated with the Medici arms in light amber, surmounted by a crown. These are encircled by four ivory bas-reliefs of various saints on a dark background. The same decorative scheme is repeated on the short sides and on the back, making it impossible to miss out on the casket’s dedication to the Medici, who owned one of the largest collections of relics in Europe. The top surface of the casket is adorned by four lily-shaped finials, with some petals lost to the ravages of time; these could be associated both with the Medici fleur-de-lys and the lily, Saint Casimir’s attribute. The Lithuanian patron saint on horseback crowns the entire ensemble. Although Vilnius was not associated with amber, Pac nonetheless delivered to Cosimo an artefact that through its form references Lithuania and Florence—with its materiality pointing to the funerary function of the object while taking the origins of the material out of the picture.
These open-ended formal and material semantics once more raise the question of amber’s geography. Archival evidence of the artwork’s commission points to Danzig, but the work itself only references the Medici and the Paces, and thus, indirectly, Florence and Vilnius. While it contains the remains of a fifteenth-century saint, the reliquary was gifted in the context of seventeenth-century dynastic politics. Letha Ch’ien has aptly defined such containment of multiple geographies and temporalities in a single artefact as ‘polytopos’.97 Polytopos translocates a place across time and space, absorbing it into other places and allowing these places to be absorbed back into themselves. Foreign can be incorporated into local without the translation coming into focus. Thus, Prussia is both present in the reliquary and removed from it, enabling other places to come into the limelight. It is not that amber’s geographical origins were made irrelevant in the artefacts crafted by Prussian masters, but these objects’ open-ended semantics ensured that they would matter differently to different beholders, in different ways and for different reasons.
Such polytopic framing of amber adds subtlety to the material’s conventional understanding as either German or Polish. Rachel King has pointed to the excesses of ethnocentric definitions of amber under National Socialism.98 As she remarks, in the 1930s the material was praised as ‘the blonde stone reminiscent of German curls and ripe sheafs’.99 German consumers were encouraged to buy this material to bring relief to Danzig, a German city detached from the rest of Germany by the reputedly unjust decision of the League of Nations: ‘but if you, German man, and you, German woman, choose the beautiful objects made of amber, so you will be bringing with them a wonderful gift from your homeland soil [Heimaterde], while providing hundreds of job opportunities [to your fellow Germans in Danzig] and also allowing them to be part of the strengthening of our Fatherland as they look to the future with joy’.100 Amber is seen in this account, rather bizarrely given its marine origins, as a product of native soil—likely because at that time it was industrially mined in the Prussian littoral.101 Less ominously but equally solipsistically, Janina Grabowska in her monograph Polski bursztyn (Polish Amber, 1982) observes that ‘the history of Polish carved ambers is an element of the history of our nation’. She thus claims Danzig for Poland (although for her the city must always be called Gdańsk), recalling—in a truly circular manner—a small Polish minority who lived there throughout history.102 The problem with this easy conflation of the material’s origins and the place of the artefact’s facture is that it can slide too easily from analysis of artworks to assertions about distinctive ethnic or national traits of their makers. Such a take on artistic geography, as Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann reminds us, is a form of ethnic essentialism and environmental determinism.103 Art historians like Josef Strzygowski (1862–1941) and other Nazi sympathizers, inspired both by Johann Gottfried Herder’s idea of the spirit of the people (Volksgeist) and by the agrarian romantic notion of blood and soil (Blut und Boden), distorted this type of scholarship to a breaking point as they attempted to establish what was specifically German about German art. We, then, need to think twice before applying notions of origins to our interpretations of art. As Angela Vanhaelen has succinctly put it (paraphrasing Nathaniel Hawthorne), ‘art history will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted in the same worn-out soil’.104
Kaufmann’s diagnosis that art history needs a new geography of art is still as pressing as ever in the era of growing ethnonationalism and populism that we are facing in the 2020s. The study of amber responds to Kaufmann’s appeal by demonstrating how geographical determinism fails in confrontation with historical realities of art making and reception, when cosmopolitan thinking among art collectors and artists was the norm rather than the exception. The design of carved ambers was not embedded in any specific local geology or place of origin. Rather than pointing to a single locus of production, amber’s materiality had the power to connote different geographies, a polytopic potential endorsed by makers and patrons who were eager to capitalize on the material’s symbolic value as they extended their networks and self-fashioned themselves. There is a material geography in place here—after all, Prussia was the beginning of amber’s European peregrinations—but the region was merely one of the many places that shaped the material’s ongoing appeal.
Amber’s multiple geographies unfolded in a great many different directions, and this article has elucidated some of them. We saw how Brandenburg and Polish rulers claimed ownership over the material due to their sovereignty over parts of Prussia. We witnessed how artists working in Prussian cities (some of whom, like Maucher, were not Prussian by birth) created a great environment for thinking about amber’s material properties and cultural valences. We acknowledged how the artistic ingenuity evident in Prussian carved ambers helped these artists reach an international audience. We met patrons like Mikołaj Stefan Pac, who although detached from Prussia politically was linked to amber makers in Danzig through networks of patronage and cultural practices necessary to establish and maintain his family’s powerbase in Lithuania. He was merely one of the many consumers of carved ambers scattered all over early modern Europe. Even today, most historical amber artefacts are located outside Gdańsk (formerly Danzig) and Kaliningrad (formerly Königsberg), the main production centres in early modernity. As they linked and mediated artistic traditions and communities, the transnational implications of Prussian carved ambers are thus hard to miss. Respecting the geographical mobility and distributed agency of amber-made artefacts demands that we imagine them not as isolated things in a single place, but instead as active vehicles of merging and converging cultures. Prussian carved ambers evoked many places simultaneously, including Prussia, Brandenburg, Poland, Lithuania and even Italy. Prussian-made and yet transregional in scope, these artefacts expand early modern artistic geography to more places than may immediately meet the eye.
Footnotes
I would like to thank Kat Hill, Ulinka Rublack and the anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments and incisive feedback on earlier versions of this article.
‘Prunkgefäß in Form einer Nautilusschale’, in Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, https://skd-online-collection.skd.museum/Details/Index/194909, accessed 20 May 2021.
On Heise, see A. Rohde, Bernstein, ein deutscher Werkstoff: seine künstliche Verarbeitung vom Mittelalter bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1937), pp. 40–1; G. Reineking von Bock, Bernstein: das Gold der Ostsee (Munich, 1981), pp. 35–6; K. Hinrichs, ‘Bernstein, das “Preußische Gold” in Kunst- und Naturalienkammern und Museen des 16.–20. Jahrhunderts’ (PhD Thesis, Humboldt-Universität, 2007), pp. 130–1.
R. King, ‘Finding the Divine Falernian: Amber in Early Modern Italy’, V&A Online Journal, 5 (2013), http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/journals/research-journal/issue-no.-5-2013/finding-the-divine-falernian-amber-in-early-modern-italy/.
On the history of Prussia, see K. Friedrich, Brandenburg-Prussia, 1466–1806: The Rise of a Composite State (Basingstoke, 2012).
K. A. Piacenti, ‘Ambre e avori’, in K. A. Piacenti (ed.), Ambre, avori, lacche, cere, medaglie e monete (Milan, 1981), pp. 23–9, here pp. 24–5; M. Piwocka, ‘Elżbieta Stuart: “Nieznana dama” z Galerii w Nieświeżu’, Folia Historiae Artium, 24 (1988), pp. 155–66, here p. 158; Hinrichs, ‘Bernstein’.
Rohde, Bernstein, p. 41.
See J. L. Sponsel and E. Haenel (eds.), Das Grüne Gewölbe zu Dresden: Eine Auswahl von Meisterwerken der Goldschmiedekunst, vol. 4 (Leipzig, 1932), p. 140. All translations are mine unless noted otherwise.
Hinrichs, ‘Bernstein’, p. 130.
G. Agricola, De la generatione de le cose,... recato tutto hora dal latino in buona lingua volgare (Venice, 1550), p. 236; C. Gesner, De omni rerum fossilium genere, gemmis, lapidibus, metallis, et hujusmodi, libri aliquot, plerique nunc primum editi opera (Zurich, 1565), ff. 22r–24r.
I. A. Polyakova, ‘The Justification of the Healing Properties of Amber in the Frame of Natural Philosophy: Background to the Problem’, in I. A. Polyakova, C. J. Duffin and T. J. Suvorova (eds), Amber in the History of Medicine (Kaliningrad, 2016), pp. 133–52; I. A. Polyakova, ‘Collecting Amber Naturalia in Sixteenth-Century Prussia’, in I. A. Polyakova (ed.), Collection in the Space of Culture (Kaliningrad, 2019), pp. 63–81.
R. King, ‘Whose Amber? Changing Notions of Amber’s Geographical Origin’, Ostblick, 2 (2014), pp. 1–22, here p. 1.
S. Burghartz, L. Burkart, C. Göttler and U. Rublack (eds), Materialized Identities in Early Modern Culture, 1450–1750: Objects, Affects, Effects (Amsterdam, 2021); S. Ivanič, M. Laven and A. Morrall, Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World (Amsterdam, 2019).
M. Rampley, The Vienna School of Art History: Empire and the Politics of Scholarship, 1847–1918 (University Park, PA, 2013), pp. 74–5; E. Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London, 1992), pp. 186–8.
T. Grusiecki, ‘Foreign as Native: Baltic Amber in Florence’, World Art, 7, 1 (2017), pp. 3–36.
Ovid, The Metamorphoses, trans. A. Mandelbaum (New York, 1993), pp. 52–4. Early modern translation, ‘Il Po, lavando al giovinetto il volto’, in Ovid, Le transformationi, trans. L. Dolce (Venice, 1555), p. 42. For the identification of the Eridanus with the Po (Padus in Latin), see Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham (Loeb Classical Library, 2; Cambridge, MA, 1947), p. 87.
King, ‘Whose Amber?’; R. King, ‘The Shining Example of “Prussian Gold”: Amber and Cross-Cultural Connections between Italy and the Baltic in the Early Modern Period’, in A. Lipińska (ed.), Materiał rzeźby: Między techniką a semantyką (Wrocław, 2009), pp. 456–70; R. S. Noyes et al., ‘Translating Corpisanti Catacomb Relic-sculptures between Rome, Polish Livonia, and the Lithuanian Grand Duchy circa 1750–1800’, Open Research Europe, 1, 18 (2021), doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.13259.1; R. S. Noyes, ‘“The Polar Winds Have Driven Me to the Conquest of the Treasure in the Form of the Much-desired Relic”: (Re)moving Relics and Performing Gift Exchange between Early Modern Tuscany and Lithuania’, in G. Strenga and L. Kjar (eds), Gifts and Materiality: Gifts as Objects in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (London, 2022), pp. 103–31.
O. Pelka, Bernstein (Berlin, 1920); A. R. Chodyński, ‘Spis bursztynników gdańskich’, Rocznik Gdański, 41, 1 (1981), pp. 193–214; S. Netzer, ‘Bernsteingeschenke in der preussischen Diplomatie des 17. Jahrhunderts’, Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen, 35 (1993), pp. 227–46.
Polyakova, ‘Collecting Amber Naturalia’.
J. Grabowska, Polski bursztyn (Warsaw, 1982), pp. 14–24.
J. Bielak, ‘Mecenat miasta Gdańska wobec bursztynnictwa: Przyczynek do semantyki wyrobów rzemiosła w podarunkach dyplomatycznych nowożytnego miasta’, in J. Hochleitner (ed.), Bursztyn jako dobro turystyczne basenu Morza Bałtyckiego (Elbląg, 2008), pp. 39–60. Amber was an expensive material in the early modern period; see King, ‘The Shining Example of “Prussian Gold”’, p. 461.
For instance, Sigismund III sent a selection of ambers as a gift to Anne of Denmark, wife of King James VI and I of Scotland and England. See Piwocka, ‘Elżbieta Stuart’, p. 158 n. 11. For the original description of these gifts, see William Bruce, Diary, Archiwum Państwowe, Gdańsk, Bibl. Arch. Sygn. 300 R/Bb 32, f. 45, 52–53. In 1596, papal legate Enrico Caetano received in gift from Sigismund a crucifix, a tray for ampules, a crucifix-shaped pax and a tabernacle for the Holy Sacrament ‘made in Danzig’. See E. Mierzwińska, ‘Bursztynnictwo’, Aurea porta Rzeczypospolitej: Sztuka Gdańska od połowy XV do końca XVII wieku (Gdańsk, 1997), pp. 141–56, here p. 147.
King, ‘Whose Amber?’, p. 5.
Netzer, ‘Bernsteingeschenke’; J. Falcke, Studien zum diplomatischen Geschenkwesen am brandenburgisch-preußischen Hof im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2004).
‘Una lumiera grande a tre palchi, con otto viticci per palco d’ambra gialla, con aovati e tondi pieni di figurine e storiettine d’ambra bianca, e un’aquila sopra che la par che la rega attacata nel mezzo a detta Tribuna, numero 1’, in P. Barocchi and G. Gaeta Bertelà (eds), Collezionismo mediceo e storia artistica, vol. 2: Il Cardinale Carlo, Maria Maddalena, Don Lorenzo, Ferdinando II, Vittoria della Rovere, 1621–1666 (Florence, 2005), pp. 558–688, f. 25v. For the history of this artefact, see King, ‘Whose Amber?’, p. 14 n. 60.
R. Lassels, The voyage of Italy... (Paris, 1670), pp. 167–8; J. G. Keyssler, Travels through Germany, Bohemia, Hungary, Switzerland, Italy and Lorraine (London, 1756), p. 431. On the location in the Medici Tribuna, see S. J. Schaefer, ‘The Studiolo of Francesco I de’ Medici in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence’ (PhD Thesis, Bryn Mawr College, 1976), p. 75.
S. Göbel der Jüngere, Einfeltiger jedoch gründtlicher Bericht und Bedencken: vom ursprung des Agadt oder Börnsteins, woher derselbige komme und in wasserley Kranckheit er gebrauchet wie auch von dem Ohl so darauß distiliret wird (Königsberg, 1616), chap. 1.
Netzer, ‘Bernsteingeschenke’.
S. Twardowski, Przeważna legacyja Krzysztofa Zbaraskiego od Zygmunta III do Sołtana Mustafy, ed. R. Krzywy (Warsaw, 2000), p. 91.
P. Freus, ‘“Korona” z bursztynu króla Jana III Sobieskiego a bursztyn w kulturze Rzeczypospolitej do połowy XVIII wieku’, Silva Rerum (2018), 9 Aug. 2018, https://www.wilanow-palac.pl/korona_z_bursztynu_krola_jana_iii_sobieskiego_a_bursztyn_w_kulturze_rzeczypospolitej_do_polowy_xviii_wieku.html; K. A. Piacenti, ‘Due altari in ambra al Museo degli Argenti’, Bolletino d’Arte, 51, 1/2 (1966), pp. 163–6; Piacenti, ‘Ambre e avori’.
C. Lechicki, Mecenat Zygmunta III i życie umysłowe na jego dworze (Warsaw, 1932), p. 179; Mierzwińska, ‘Bursztynnictwo’, p. 146.
M. Bernasikowa, ‘Szachownica króla Zygmunta w zbiorach wawelskich’, Studia do Dziejów Wawelu, 3 (1968), pp. 498–503; D. Nowacki, ‘Szachownica Zygmunta III’, in J. Żukowski (ed.), Świat polskich Wazów: Przestrzeń, ludzie, sztuka, exhibition catalogue (Warsaw, 2019), pp. 65–6.
M. Gębarowicz, ‘Dzieła złotnictwa polskiego pochodzenia w skarbcu zamku królewskiego w Monachium’, in J. Szablowski (ed.), Studia do dziejów Wawelu, 4 (Cracow, 1978), pp. 299–331, here pp. 310–1.
Grabowska, Polski bursztyn, p. 14.
V. Lukoševičius, ‘Lithuania Minor and Prussia on the Old Maps (1525–1808)’, Geodesy and Cartography, 39, 1 (2013), pp. 23–39.
J. Speed, A Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World (London, 1631), p. 32.
George Ent to Cassiano dal Pozzo, 5 Nov. 1639, MS H 268, f. 62, Bibliothèque Médecine, University of Montpellier, translated in A. Cook, ‘A Roman Correspondence: Georg Ent and Cassiano dal Pozzo, 1637–55’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 59, 1 (2005), pp. 5–23, here p. 17.
Agricola, De la generatione de le cose, ff. 228v, 238r.
A. Aurifaber, Succini historia (Königsberg, 1551); S. Göbel, De succino: libri duo (Frankfurt/Main, 1558); Reineking von Bock, Bernstein, pp. 170–1; Grabowska, Polski bursztyn, pp. 5–8.
Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. D. E. Eichholz (Loeb Classical Library, 10; Cambridge, MA, 1957), p. 195.
Tacitus, La Germanie, trans. J. Perret (Paris, 1983), p. 99.
S. Starowolski, Polska albo opisanie Królestwa polskiego, trans. A. Piskadło (Cracow, 1976), p. 137.
The author, perhaps informed by Tacitus, reports that following high tide, amber is thrown onto the shores, where it is gathered for profit by ‘naked’ waders. Starowolski, Polska, p. 106.
Pelka, Bernstein; Rohde, Bernstein.
Grabowska, Polski bursztyn.
U. Aldrovandi, Musaeum metallicum (Bologna, 1648), pp. 409–12.
Aurifaber, Succini historia, c. 5.
Agricola, De la generatione de le cose, f. 227r. For ‘un sugo grasso della terra’, see ibid., f. 237r.
For Pliny, amber was ‘the gum of pine’. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. D. E. Eichholz, p. 197; Tacitus, La Germanie, pp. 98–9; Aristotle, ‘Meteorology’, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 1, ed. J. Barnes (Princeton, 1984), p. 623.
A. Mottana, ‘Italian Gemology during the Renaissance: A Step toward Modern Mineralogy’, in G. B. Vai and W. G. E. Caldwell (eds), The Origins of Geology in Italy (Boulder, 2006), pp. 1–21, here p. 9.
P. A. Mattioli, Della materia medicinale (Venice, 1563), pp. 110–11.
The myth of the Heliades was one of the most frequently depicted stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and amber offered a particularly suitable medium to explore the metamorphic arc of Ovid’s poetry. See P. Barolsky, Ovid and the Metamorphoses of Modern Art from Botticelli to Picasso (New Haven, 2014); C. Allen, ‘Ovid and Art’, in P. Hardie (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ovid (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 336–67.
First published in Latin in 1471 and in Italian in 1497, his Metamorphoses reappeared in various editions, languages and formats, many of them illustrated, becoming one of the most accessible texts of the early modern period. For example, see the pocket version of Andrea dall’Anguillara’s translation, published in Venice in 1624. I have consulted a copy in the Newberry Library, Chicago, Case PA6525.M2 A53 1624. See also the following pocket editions in the Newberry Library: Venice 1502, Vault Greenlee 5100.O96 1502; Leiden 1588, Case Y 672.O9458; Burgos 1609, Case PA6526.M2 P47 1609.
M. Trusted, Catalogue of European Ambers in the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, 1985), pp. 28–30.
Martial, Select Epigrams, trans. L. Watson and P. Watson (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 162–3.
P. Simons, ‘(Check) Mating the Grand Masters: The Gendered, Sexualized Politics of Chess in Renaissance Italy’, Oxford Art Journal, 16, 1 (1993), pp. 59–74, here pp. 69–70; O. Jacoby and J. R. Crawford, The Backgammon Book (New York, 1970), pp. 7–54.
Ø. Ore, Cardano: The Gambling Scholar (Princeton, 2017), p. 112.
Rohde, Bernstein.
S. Brisman, ‘The Image That Wants to be Read: An Invitation for Interpretation in a Drawing by Albrecht Dürer’, Word & Image, 29, 3 (2013), pp. 273–303.
H.-U. Mette, Der Nautiluspokal: wie Kunst und Natur miteinander spielen (Munich, 1995), pp. 146–7; A. Grasskamp, ‘Shells, Bodies, and the Collector’s Cabinet’, in M. A. Bass, A. Goldgar, H. Grootenboer and C. Swan (eds), Conchophilia: Shells, Art, and Curiosity in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, 2021), pp. 49–71, here pp. 49–52.
M. Cole, ‘The Cult of Materials’, in S. Clerbois and M. Droth (eds), Revival and Invention: Sculpture through Its Material Histories (Oxford, 2011), pp. 1–15; U. Rublack, ‘Matter in the Material Renaissance’, Past & Present, 219 (2013), pp. 41–85; V. Thielemans, ‘Beyond Visuality: Review on Materiality and Affect’, Perspective, 2 (2015), https://journals.openedition.org/perspective/5993; J. L. Roberts, ‘Things: Material Turn, Transnational Turn’, American Art, 31, 2 (2017), pp. 64–9; S. Roberts and T. McCall, ‘Object Lessons and Raw Materials’, in W. Caferro (ed.), The Routledge History of the Renaissance (New York, 2017), pp. 105–24.
B. Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford, 2005); A. Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford, 1998); J. Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC, 2010); G. Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (London, 2018).
M. Heidegger, ‘The Thing’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York, 1971), pp. 161–83; B. Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 28, 1 (2001), pp. 1–22.
M. Ficino, Three Books on Life, trans. C. V. Kaske and J. R. Clark (Binghamton, NY, 1989), book 1, p. 9; H. C. Agrippa von Nettesheim, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, ed. D. Tysontrans and J. Freake (St. Paul, MI, 2004), p. 76.
A. Georgievska-Shine, ‘Horror and Pity: Thoughts on the Sense of the Tragic in Rubens’s Hero and Leander and The Fall of Phaeton’, Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, 63 (2003), pp. 217–28, here p. 225.
Rublack, ‘Matter in the Material Renaissance’, pp. 42–3.
M. Csikszentmihalyi, ‘Why We Need Things’, in S. Lubar and D. D. Kingery (eds), History from Things: Essays on Material Culture (Washington DC, 1993), pp. 20–9.
K. A. Perry, Another Reality: Metamorphosis and the Imagination in the Poetry of Ovid, Petrarch, and Ronsard (New York, 1990), p. 18; C. W. Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York, 2001), p. 169.
On early modern ordering of nature in terms of similitude and resemblance, see M. Foucault, The Order of Things (London, 2002), p. 33. Literature on early modern natural history is vast and growing. See, for example, S. Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany (Chicago, 2011); B. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago, 2006); P. Findlen, ‘Natural History,’ in K. Park and L. Daston (eds), The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3: Early Modern Science (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 448–9.
H. Grootenboer, The Pensive Image: Art as a Form of Thinking (Chicago, 2020), p. 2.
Brown, ‘Thing Theory’.
F. Braudel, Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible, trans. S. Reynolds (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992), p. 267.
Amidst the dearth of monographs on the cultural history of amber, a notable exception is R. King, Amber: From Antiquity to Eternity (London, 2022).
R. Gennaioli and M. Sframeli (eds), Sacri splendori: il tesoro della ‘Cappella delle Reliquie’ in Palazzo Pitti (Livorno, 2014), p. 184.
On collections, see R. King, ‘Collecting Nature within Nature: Animal Inclusions in Amber in Early Modern Collections’, in A. Gáldy and S. Heudecker (eds), Collecting Nature (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2014), pp. 1–18.
Ibid., pp. 7–8.
D. Hermann, De rana et lacerta succino prussiaco insitis (Cracow, 1583).
For further analysis of Hermann’s poem, see Polyakova, ‘Collecting Amber Naturalia’, p. 74.
Martial, Select Epigrams, pp. 162–3.
R. M. Soldevila, Martial, Book IV: A Commentary (Leiden, 2006), p. 32.
Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library, trans. C. H. Oldfather (Loeb Classical Library, 3; Cambridge, MA, 1970), p. 161.
Archivio di Stato di Firenze, GM 348, II, cc. 6v–7r, n. 22. In Gennaioli and Sframeli, Sacri splendori, p. 184.
Gennaioli and Sframeli, Sacri splendori, p. 186.
Piacenti, ‘Due altari in ambra al Museo degli Argenti’, p. 164.
For the complex relationship of the German axes of the language of ingenuity with their Latin and other European analogues, see ‘German and Dutch’, in A. Marr, R. Garrod, J. R. Marcaida and R. J. Oosterhoff, Logodaedalus: Word Histories of Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe (Pittsburgh, 2019), pp. 153–91.
J. Trabant, ‘Du génie aux gènes des langues’, in H. Meschonnic (ed.), Et le génie des langues? (Saint Denis, 2000), p. 80.
R. Toye, Rhetoric: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2013), pp. 36–42.
For wit, skill and ingenuity, see ‘Introduction’, in Marr, Garrod, Marcaida and Oosterhoff, Logodaedalus, pp. 1–17, here p. 1.
P. H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 2012); G. Adamson, The Invention of Craft (London, 2013).
K. E. Kandt and G.-H. Vogel, ‘Christoph Maucher in Danzig: Episodes from a Baroque Wanderkünstler in Central Europe and Some Observations on the Social Status of Artists during the Early Modern Period’, Ikonotheka, 22 (2009), pp. 181–209.
F. Mamuszka, ‘Rzemiosło artystyczne w Gdańsku: Aneks’, in F. Mamuszka (ed.), Gdańsk, jego dzieje i kultura (Warsaw, 1969), pp. 469–77, here p. 472.
A. S. Czyż, ‘Pamięć o poprzednikach i kłótnie z kapitułą, czyli o działalności Biskupa Mikołaja Stefana Paca na rzecz skarbca Katedry Wileńskiej’, Humanities and Social Sciences, 23, 3 (2018), pp. 9–30, here p. 26.
Noyes et al., ‘Translating Corpisanti’.
T. Venclova, ‘Mit o początku’, Teksty, 4 (1974), pp. 104–16.
Noyes, ‘“The Polar Winds”’.
The object’s manufacture in Danzig is confirmed by a letter preserved in the Archivio di Stato in Florence, sent in January 1678 from Pac to Cosimo Brunetti, the Medicis’ agent in Danzig, in which the former reports on the completion status of ‘two boxes, one in silver, the other in amber, which [he] had already ordered to secure said holy relics’, see Gennaioli and Sframeli, Sacri splendori, p. 266.
Noyes, ‘“The Polar Winds”’; Noyes et al., ‘Translating Corpisanti’.
L. Ch’ien, ‘Polytopos in Early Modern Venetian Imagery’, in M. Folin and A. Musarra (eds), Cultures and Practices of Coexistence from the Thirteenth through the Seventeenth Centuries: Multi-Ethnic Cities in the Mediterranean World (New York, 2020), pp. 117–30.
King, ‘Whose Amber?’
W. Bölsche, ‘Der deutsche Bernstein’, Velhagen und Klasings Monatshefte, 2 (1934/1935), pp. 89–90.
‘Bernstein als urdeutscher Schmuck’, Die Gold-schmiedekunst, 9 (1933), p. 433.
King, Amber, pp. 90–2.
Grabowska, Polski bursztyn, p. 37.
T. D. Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art (Chicago, 2004).
A. Vanhaelen, ‘Review of Dutch Art and Urban Cultures, 1200–1700, by Elisabeth de Bièvre’, Art Bulletin, 98, 3 (2016), pp. 397–9.
