拍品專文
Incomparably the greatest and most ambitious work of art ever made in amber was the so-called Amber Room, which was commissioned by Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia, and measured 10.16 m. by 10.13 m. with walls 6 metres high. On the recommendation of King Frederick IV of Denmark it was begun by the Danish master, Gottfried Wolfram, in 1701. By 1707 work had progressed sufficiently far for what documents refer to as 'die grosse Wandt' ('the large wall') to be installed in the Palace at Charlottenburg. It was in that same year, however, that Eosander von Göthe, the master of the works, dismissed Wolfram and contracted with two amber cutters from Danzig (Gdansk), Ernst Schacht and Gottfried Turau, for the completion of the room. They appear to have finished the work by the end of 1711, and in 1713 Peter the Great so admired the room, by this time installed in the Stadtschloss in Berlin, that it was presented to him as a gift. The Amber Room reached St. Petersburg in 1717, but it was not until 1755-60 that it was definitively installed in Djetskoje (formerly Zarskoje) Ssélo (Pushkin), with some rococo additions, by Alessandro Martelli. There it remained until the last war, when it was removed to Königsberg by the advancing German army in 1941, and installed in the Schloss there. In 1944 it was dismantled once more, and disappeared as the Soviet forces occupied Germany. Ever since there has been considerable speculation concerning its whereabouts and the possibility that it may one day resurface (Janssen, loc. cit.).
At the time of its installation in Königsberg, Alfred Rohde, the author of what remains the classic work on amber, published in 1937, wrote an article on the Amber Room (Rohde, 1942, loc. cit.). In it he discussed the authorship of the room, whose ambitious design is generally agreed to have been beyond the capabilities of the workers in amber and argued that it was very probably the responsibility of the distinguished Berlin sculptor and architect, Andreas Schlüter. In support of this contention, he illustrated a detail showing one of eight heads ('Masken sterbenden Krieger' - 'masks of dying warriors', in his words), which he compared with the masks on Schlüter's Zeughaus in Berlin (Rohde, 1942, op. cit., p. 202). The reconstruction of one of the panels made by the Soviet workshops under G.S. Chosackij in the 1980's (G. Reineking von Bock, op. cit., fig. 213) establishes the original location of these heads, which are almost impossible to identify in the existing photographs of the room as a whole.
The present, extremely distinctive amber head is virtually - but not absolutely - identical to the head illustrated by Rohde. Indeed, the similarities are so great that it might be wondered whether it is not one of the remaining seven heads, of which detail photographs do not exist. However, the mounting of the present piece, the typography of the extract from an old sale catalogue stuck onto its reverse, even the box made for it, all suggest a pre-war date for its present appearance. In that case, two alternative possibilities suggest themselves: either it was removed from the Amber Room at a much earlier date, conceivably even before its installation in Russia, or it was produced by one of the three amber masters - Wolfram, Schacht, or Turau - as an independent work of art or trial piece while they were working on the room. Rohde (1937, op. cit., pp. 55-6 and 1942, op. cit. p. 200) emphasises the extraordinary technical achievement involved in what he calls 'Incrustation' and the possibilities it allowed for deeper cutting of the amber and more baroque effects. Seen in those terms, the present piece, whose inventive fantasy is in all probability Schlüter's, also stands as an exceptional testimony to its cutter's virtuosity.
At the time of its installation in Königsberg, Alfred Rohde, the author of what remains the classic work on amber, published in 1937, wrote an article on the Amber Room (Rohde, 1942, loc. cit.). In it he discussed the authorship of the room, whose ambitious design is generally agreed to have been beyond the capabilities of the workers in amber and argued that it was very probably the responsibility of the distinguished Berlin sculptor and architect, Andreas Schlüter. In support of this contention, he illustrated a detail showing one of eight heads ('Masken sterbenden Krieger' - 'masks of dying warriors', in his words), which he compared with the masks on Schlüter's Zeughaus in Berlin (Rohde, 1942, op. cit., p. 202). The reconstruction of one of the panels made by the Soviet workshops under G.S. Chosackij in the 1980's (G. Reineking von Bock, op. cit., fig. 213) establishes the original location of these heads, which are almost impossible to identify in the existing photographs of the room as a whole.
The present, extremely distinctive amber head is virtually - but not absolutely - identical to the head illustrated by Rohde. Indeed, the similarities are so great that it might be wondered whether it is not one of the remaining seven heads, of which detail photographs do not exist. However, the mounting of the present piece, the typography of the extract from an old sale catalogue stuck onto its reverse, even the box made for it, all suggest a pre-war date for its present appearance. In that case, two alternative possibilities suggest themselves: either it was removed from the Amber Room at a much earlier date, conceivably even before its installation in Russia, or it was produced by one of the three amber masters - Wolfram, Schacht, or Turau - as an independent work of art or trial piece while they were working on the room. Rohde (1937, op. cit., pp. 55-6 and 1942, op. cit. p. 200) emphasises the extraordinary technical achievement involved in what he calls 'Incrustation' and the possibilities it allowed for deeper cutting of the amber and more baroque effects. Seen in those terms, the present piece, whose inventive fantasy is in all probability Schlüter's, also stands as an exceptional testimony to its cutter's virtuosity.