Philipp von Stosch

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Philipp von Stosch (Pier Leone Ghezzi)

Baron Philipp von Stosch or Philippe de Stosch etc. (22 March 1691 – 7 November 1757) was a Prussian antiquarian who lived in Rome and Florence.

He is mainly remembered for his huge collection of engraved gems, now mostly in Berlin, and his large books on that subject.

Life

Stosch was born in

Küstrin, Stosch began a tour of Holland, France, and England, which eventually led him to Italy. In Rome, a letter of introduction brought him into the circle of Pope Clement XI, a collector and connoisseur of antiquities. Soon he developed a close friendship with the cardinal-nephew, Alessandro Albani
. Called home with the death of his elder brother in 1717, Stosch began a series of broader European journeys.

Once again in Rome, Stosch became a dealer in art and antiquities at the center of the antiquarian group that were commissioning excavations in search of works of art. Above all he was a collector of engraved gems of antiquity, books and manuscripts, early engravings and drawings and reputedly a connoisseur of Roman men (reference to his homosexuality).[1] He financed his passions by some unorthodox means, including spying on the Jacobite court in Rome for Sir Robert Walpole's British Government.[2] Stosch was unmasked as a clandestine operative in 1731, and his life was threatened. He was forced to flee the Papal States and took refuge in Florence, under the tolerant rule of Grand Duke Gian Gastone de' Medici. There he settled into a long retirement devoted to connoisseurship, pensioned by the British until he died in 1757. Before long his growing collection required a separate house of its own. (ref. Datenbank Altertumswissenschaften)

Stosch was a founder of a

Rosicrucian, alchemical-panphilosophical nature. The lodge was closed and Tommaso Crudeli
was imprisoned.

He encouraged young German artists, not merely those who illustrated his own works but others, like

Johann Lorenz Natter (1705-1763), a German gem-engraver and medalist whom Stosch set to copying ancient carved gems in Florence and whose Masonic medal commemorating the Mastership of Charles Sackville, 1733, was engraved and widely distributed (ref. Pelizzi). Versions of it exist in gold and in silver; the Grand Duke apparently got a silver one, now at the Bargello
.

Stosch is credited with making the

Palladian
and Neoclassical uses of the Stosch volume might be instanced.

The baron's own great collection eventually contained over 10,000 cameos, intaglios, and antique glass pastes, the majority of which eventually went to the

museums in Berlin. The hardstone carvings among his collections, which rivaled numismatics for their interest to antiquarians, were engraved and entrusted for publication to Winckelmann.[5] Winckelmann's work was underwritten by Baron von Stosch's nephew and heir,[6]
Heinrich Wilhelm Muzel, another lifelong bachelor, who had come to stay in Florence with Stosch in 1757 and had been adopted and made Philipp von Stosch's heir (ref. Universitätsbibliothek Trier) .Thus he was looking for prospective purchasers of his uncle's collection just at this moment.

Winckelmann's last letter, penned in the Trieste inn the night he was murdered by a young man he had just picked up, was addressed to Muzel-Stosch. In 1765 King

Gentleman's Magazine
and found their way into Neoclassical marquetry medallions on London-made furniture and other minor decorative arts.

Among other elements in the dispersed collections, the Atlas—of 324 volumes— in which Stosch kept his drawings, among other things the entire cache of drawings left by the Baroque architect

Borromini, which Stosch acquired about 1730, before his withdrawal to Florence (ref. Connors), eventually went to Vienna. His considerable library, strong in "history, politics, diplomacy, conclaves, embassies and relazioni from distant parts" (Connors), was purchased in 1759 for the Vatican Library where it is housed with the then recently purchased Ottoboni library (and bear the shelfmarks Ottob.lat. 2565-3100). One of the codices, containing important musical notation, which had belonged to Queen Christina and was given by her to the Vatican Library, was stolen and appeared in Stosch's library, when was then sold to the Vatican in 1759 and thus was returned (ref. Ottoboni Lat. 3025).(Particularly valuable early prints found individual purchasers: Stosch's group of niello prints attributed to Tommaso di Finiguerra were bought by the Leipzig merchant Ernst Peter Otto (1724–99), whose celebrated print collection was dispersed in massive sales in 1851-52.[7]

Some of his medals were acquired by unconventional means. According to an anecdote related by

Isaac d'Israeli
,

It was in looking over the gems of the royal cabinet of medals, that the keeper perceived the loss of one; his place, his pension, and his reputation were at stake; and he insisted that Baron Stosch should be most minutely examined: in this dilemma, forced to confession, this erudite collector assured the keeper of the royal cabinet, that the strictest search would not avail “Alas, sir! I have it here within,” he said, pointing to his breast. An emetic was suggested by the learned practitioner himself, probably from some former experiment.[8]

In 1764 some of his collections were sold at auction, his architectural drawings, strong in sixteenth century architects, went to enrich the

Albertina, Vienna. The Codex Stosch, a bound volume of measured drawings of ancient Roman buildings made by the brother of Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, disappeared after the sale. The codex reappeared in 2005 and was purchased for the RIBA Library, London
.

His profile portrait appears on a medal he commissioned from François Marteau in 1727.[9]

His widely circulated letters on antiquarian subjects were reassembled in Carl Justi, Antiquarische Briefe des Baron Philipp von Stosch (1871).

Baron Von Stosch was buried in the Old English Cemetery in Livorno, where his grave, still existing, is badly damaged.

Notes

  1. ^ Stosch was colourfully described by Sir Compton Mackenzie as 'an expatriated Prussian sodomite' (Diana Preston, The road to Culloden Moor: Bonnie Prince Charlie and the '45 Rebellion, 1995:21; Theo Aronson, Kings over the water: the saga of the Stuart pretenders, 1979:119); according to Jonathan Irvine Israel (Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750, 2002:133), von Stosch was "the legendary deist, freemason, and open homosexual"; Tim Blanning, Frederick the Great, 2015
  2. ^ James Francis Edward Stuart was the permanent guest in Rome of the Papacy. In the wake of the Jacobite plot instigated by Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester, revealed in 1721, all attentions paid at Rome to the "Old Pretender" by English and Scottish gentlemen on the Grand Tour were of interest to Walpole's ministry.
  3. ^ A Concise History of Freemasonry Archived 18 August 2007 at the Wayback Machine OLD EPSOMIAN LODGE
  4. ^ A copy of the second edition, 1747, was no. 148 in the sale of the library of Pallinsburn House, (Lyon & Turnbull) which also contained the Codex Stosch of drawings by Giovanni Battista da Sangallo [1]
  5. Johann Justin Preisler
    , another illustrator of Stosch's antiquities (refs Tuscher; Preisler).
  6. ^ Stosch's younger brother, who lived with him in Florence, had died in 1747 (ref. Datenbank Altertumswissenschaften).
  7. ^ The niello prints from Stosch formed the opening lots in the second auction.
  8. ^ Curiosities of Literature, 1791 etc. (on-line)
  9. ^ "Illustrated". Archived from the original on 26 August 2006. Retrieved 18 May 2006.

References

Further reading

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