Potrzeba trwania
The need for continuity

Author(s): Kamila Kłudkiewicz
Subject(s): Fine Arts / Performing Arts, History of Art
Published by: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Adama Mickiewicza
Keywords: iconographic collections; collections of engravings and drawings; collections from the 19th century; Polish collections; collections from Polish territories
Summary/Abstract: The book is a pioneering study of the phenomenon of iconographic collections in the nineteenth century, which have not previously been the subject of scholarly reflection. Its subject matter is collections of prints and drawings depicting monuments, antiquities, works of art, crafts, portraits of historical figures, landscapes, and popular types and products. Such collections sometimes included outstanding graphic works or original drawings by old masters and contemporary artists, but for the most part they consisted of images produced in the 19th century using the reproduction methods characteristic of that period. They therefore combined drawings, engravings, sketches, historical prints and their contemporary copies, press illustrations, postcards and, finally, in the last quarter of the 19th century, photographs (although on a far more modest scale). Their main purpose was to visually document the past and cultural heritage of a city, region or nation. Iconographic collections were a nineteenth-century collecting phenomenon, in which the expertise of engravers, the reproductive potential of the graphic and photomechanical techniques invented in the ""long century"" intersected, along with the desire to collect illustrations in a broad sense–different aspects of human life and elements of the world around us, or in a narrower sense, visual documentation of a single theme."

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