Odkrycie nieznanej kolekcji paryskich rycin Jeremiasza Falcka oraz ich kopii przechowywanych w Statens Museum for Kunst w Kopenhadze w kontekście stanu wiedzy i perspektyw badawczych

Abstrakt

Jeremias Falck’s engraving activities which are connected with his several-year stay in Paris (in the late 1630s–1644) has not kindled much interest among scholars since the publication of Julius Caesar Block’s monogram in 1890. My long-standing interest in allegorical subjects, and the many aspects of the phenomenon of the diffusion of Western European printmaking into other fields of art and culture, led me to pursue a study of this unjustly forgotten period of his work. In the course of my preliminary research I found copies of his oeuvre – copperplate engravings, which have not been previously described and which, in the majority of cases, have never been recorded in the literature on the subject. The results of my many years of research is the discovery and the inventorying of 35 series of engravings, that fall under a broad and varied category of copies of Falck’s works from his Parisian period. It was not always possible to find complete series. However, if the likely number of plates that originally constituted these series are added up we obtain the high number of 157 new, unknown copies. A major discovery, which makes it possible to largely fill in the blanks in the state of knowledge about Falck’s Parisian period and its influence on Dutch and German graphic art was the ground-breaking research carried out in the cabinet of prints and drawings of the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen. It transpired that the Danish collection contains many copies of Falck engravings that are housed in other European collections, e.g. in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris (hereafter the BnF). These are mostly allegorical series which the engraver from Gdańsk made for the Parisian publisher Jean I Leblond: The Four Seasons, The Five Senses, The Four Ages of Man, The Four Parts of the Day. The Danish collection also includes works which the authors of Inventaire du fonds français – a multi-volume catalogue of French engravings held at the BnF in Paris – described as “dans la manière de Falck”. They consist of works belonging to separate series: The Virtues, The Seven Liberal Arts and the series, Prayer, Fasting and Almsgiving which consists of three plates. In addition, in Copenhagen there are unsigned series of The Four Elements and The Four Continents which Block attributed to Falck.