Elzbieta Mierzwinska - Castle Museum in Malbork
In the heyday of amber craft from the 16th to the early 18th century, two manufacturing centres, Gdańsk and Königsberg, played the dominant role. The amber guilds in other Baltic towns such as Słupsk, Kołobrzeg, Koszalin and Elbląg, were of secondary importance.
The development of amber workshops
When Gdańsk was incorporated into Poland (1466) and the amber craftsmen’s guild was established in 1477, craftsmen specialising in this field, who had had their development arrested by the rigorous limitations forced upon them by the Teutonic Knights’ administration, could begin to work legally again. King Casimir the Jagiellon granted Gdańsk the amber-bearing areas surrounding the city, especially the Vistula Sandbar. However, the workshops’ rapid development soon led to a shortage of the raw material. Thus, amber began to be smuggled from Sambia, which remained with the Teutonic Order, which in turn led to long-standing disputes with the Teutonic Knights. The Teutonic Grandmasters, who resided in Königsberg from 1457, went as far as demanding of the Polish king that the amber guild be dissolved. In the end, however, they incorporated the Gdańsk association into their own trade organisation (1483). In 1533, the Jaski family of Gdańsk began to import amber from the newly-established Ducal Prussia. This privilege was granted by the final Teutonic grandmaster, Duke Albrecht Hohenzollern, who became the first secular sovereign of Prussia following the Order’s secularisation. In spite of the insufficient resources coming from its own deposits, which initially belonged to the City Council, then to the guild itself, and difficulties with the Jaskis’ monopolist practices, the Gdańsk amber handicraft developed successfully and would always find new customers among the high and mighty. Apart from the increasingly wealthy bourgeoisie, amber artefacts were bought by the nobility, aristocracy and clergy; soon the royal court began to appreciate the beauty and uniqueness of these works as well. In time, it became customary to order grand, richly decorated works or entire sets of e.g. tableware from the Gdańsk amber masters, which royal envoys would then take to faraway countries as diplomatic gifts from the Polish sovereigns. Over the next two centuries, the amber masterworks made in the workshops of Gdańsk and Königsberg found their way to the treasuries of many a European monarch and prince; many magnificent gifts were sent to Russia and Turkey.
The amber artefacts of the 16th century
The variety of artefacts made in Gdańsk changed together with the Reformation, which came here in the 2nd quarter of the 16th century. The devotional items which had dominated amber craft before were replaced by objects of everyday use and luxurious bibelots. The papal legate, Cardinal Francesco Giovanni Commendone, wrote with outrage about amber “chests, spoons, vases and birdcages” (1563). Very little remains in Polish collections from that period; the extant pieces include a figurine of the Madonna on a crescent made in a workshop in Oliva near Gdańsk (Częstochowa, Paulite Monastery of Jasna Góra) and a heart-shaped medallion with a portrait of King Stefan Bathory, found in the crypt of Anna Jagiellon (Kraków, treasury of the Wawel Cathedral). The Castle Museum in Malbork has two unique examples of Renaissance amber jewellery dated at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries: a fragment of a necklace which belonged to Duchess Sybilla Dorothea of Brieg and a necklace for male attire made of cylindrical beads with sculpted garlands.
Most of the 16th century amber works which survived to our day came from Königsberg. The court of Duke Albrecht, who was a well known lover and supporter of the arts and sciences, employed many amber artists. Having access to the largest amber deposits in the world, these craftsmen could select the most attractive material. “I saw amber nuggets the size of a human head, from which His Highness, the Duke of Prussia ordered goblets and cups be made,” wrote Andreas Aurifaber, the Duke’s personal physician and the author of an extensive monograph on Baltic amber (Succini Historia, 1551) in the 2nd half of the 16th century
The Königsberg court amber artists made a well-deserved name for themselves even before their guild was established there (1641). The archival accounts of the Königsberg court show an assortment of the objects they produced; these included small receptacles (cups, bottles, pyxes), chessboards, cutlery with ivory handles, decorations, sculptures, frames for small objects. Rosenberg Castle in Copenhagen has a set of 18 silver platters with amber bottoms, made in 1585 by Königsberg jeweller Andreas Kniefel and amber artist Stenzel Schmitt. The 16th century goblets and cups described by Aurifaber may be seen today at several European museums, including the Schatzkammer der Residenz in Munich, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Kassel, the Ostpreussisches Landesmuseum in Lüneburg and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna .
The development of amber craft in the 17th century
Generally speaking, 16th century amber artefacts were small in size because due to technological limitations they were usually made out of a single nugget. From the beginning of the 17th century, however, a new technique developed by Königsberg amber craftsman Georg Schreiber determined the craft’s further development and enabled making the amber artefacts more attractive. The technique consisted in the cutting of thin plates out of the amber, decorating them in low relief, and then combining them directly with each other (“mortice and tenon joint,” using adhesives or silver). This is how the most beautiful works of Gdańsk and Königsberg amber craft were made: chests, beer mugs, pitchers, plates and cups. To make them, transparent amber nuggets were selected, so that the scenes and ornamental motifs engraved at the bottom could shine through. Flakes of gold foil began to be placed under the engravings in order to highlight their glow (the eglomise technique). Ivory began to play an important role, both functionally and ornamentally. It appears in 17th century amber artefacts usually in the form of plates with Biblical or mythological scenes, the figures of saints, panoplies and floral motifs sculpted in relief.
About the middle of the 17th century, amber artefacts began to be constructed on wooden frames. This was a much easier technique, which was effective as well, because it made it possible to produce much larger works than before. Multi-storey home altars, chests, closets with drawers for small items and various parlour games were made in this way. The wood was veneered with amber plates cut out in the form of various geometrical figures; thanks to amber’s many tints, these plates formed a marvellous mosaic of warm colours. The central parts of the chest or altar had engraved medallions made of translucent amber on gold foil, ivory reliefs or three-dimensional sculptures. The baroque splendour of these artefacts can be best seen in the works of the most distinguished masters, renowned especially for their sculpted works: Jacob Heise of Königsberg, Michel Redlin and Christoph Maucher of Gdańsk. Owning unique artefacts made of “Baltic gold” became fashionable among the highest classes of society. Several sovereigns employed amber craftsmen in their courts (e.g. at the Royal Castle in Copenhagen and the court of the Hessian Landgraves in Kassel), whose works would find their way to the court kunstkammmers, where they could be marvelled at alongside other works of art and all kinds of exotic curios which were kept there.
The Amber Room
Certainly, the most famous work to be made on royal order was the Amber Room. Frederick I, King of Prussia, wanted his idea for an amber opus to exceed all others in its scale and originality. Upon his order, the royal court architect, Andreas Schlüter, developed a design for a study which would be fully laid out with amber. In 1701, Gottfried Wolfram, the amber artist of Danish King Frederick IV was brought from the court in Copenhagen. Six years later, Wolfram was replaced by two artists from Gdańsk, Gottfried Turau and Ernst Schacht. In 1713, Frederick William I, the son and successor of Frederick I, who was known for his miserliness, ordered the by-then very advanced work to come to a halt. The ready parts of the wall facing were packed into trunks and placed in the storehouses of the Berlin Armoury. Three years later, they were sent as a gift to Russian Tsar Peter I. The Amber Room was completed several decades later at the palace in Tsarkoye Selo. Italian, Königsberg, and Russian masters worked on its completion, and the final effect differed greatly from the original design, mainly due to the much larger size of the interior, as well as the new rococo trends in art. The three amber walls were adorned with mirror pilasters, gilded sconces for hundreds of candles, four enormous mosaics made of stones from the Ural and the Caucasus and sculpted supraportes above the doors, with an enormous painted amber-imitating frieze above it all.
The Amber Room is considered to be the crowning achievement of the Golden Age of modern amber craft. As soon as in the first half of the 18th century, symptoms appeared to indicate its slow decline. This was caused both by problems in the supply of raw material and a fall in demand for luxury items made of amber. There was more demand for bibelots and trifles: small caskets and tobacco boxes, vials, sewing equipment cases, cane handles, powder horns, toiletry frames. European amber craft would experience a renewed, although not as spectacular, boom only in the 2nd half of the 19th century.
Since 2003, in place of the original Amber Room, which was lost during World War II, we can admire its reconstruction, while the relatively few extant original works from the heyday of this genre of art can be found in several European museums. The finest collections are at Rosenberg Castle in Copenhagen, the Royal Treasury at the Castle in Stockholm, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Museo Argenti in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, the Russian collections at the Hermitage and Tsarskoye Selo and the German collections in Dresden, Munich, Kassel and Lüneburg. In Poland, the largest collection of antique amber artefacts belongs to the Castle Museum in Malbork.
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