Poniatowski gem
# Poniatowski gem

The Poniatowski gems were a collection of 2500 to 3000 engraved gems commissioned by Prince Stanisław Poniatowski (1754–1833), a wealthy Polish nobleman, and passed off by him as genuine classical pieces. By the time of his death in 1833 it was becoming clear to scholars that they were instead early 19th-century neoclassical forgeries.

## History

Poniatowski was "an avid collector of art, ... once considered the richest man in Europe". He inherited approximately 154 antique gems from his uncle, King Stanisław August Poniatowski of Poland, who died in 1798. He augmented this collection with approximately 2500 to 3000 forgeries by contemporary carvers, in a florid classicizing style and in most cases signed with ancient names, while claiming publicly that the works were genuine antiquities. Poniatowski published a catalog of this work in 1830, with an update in 1833.

Although Giovanni Pichler has been suggested as one of the carvers, the date of Pichler's death in 1791 makes this unlikely. Another carver has been identified as Giovanni Calandrelli, nearly 300 of whose preliminary drawings for the gems are in the collection of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

Already, by the early 1830s, scholars began pointing out problematic issues with the style and provenance of these works. Poniatowski presented a set of 419 plaster impressions of his collection to the King of Prussia which now form the Daktyliothek Poniatowski in Berlin, where they were recognised as modern in 1832, mainly because the signatures of ancient artists from very different times were found on gems in too consistent a style.

After Poniatowski died in 1833, his collection was put up for auction, in London in 1839. The auction turned out disastrously: half the collection remained unsold, and the remaining pieces fetched prices much lower than their estimates (and lower than the value of an unforged work of Pichler's). The fiasco caused collectors' interest in engraved gems, previously a very popular field, to drop more generally for many years.

The collection was scattered, and many of its pieces have been lost or mislaid. Several works in museums, reputed to be Poniatowski gems, have been revealed on closer inspection to be replicas of the Poniatowski gems: forgeries of forgeries.

## Individual pieces

The Victoria and Albert Museum holds several pieces from the Poniatowski collection, depicting Socrates, Apollo and Daphne, Venus and Aeneas, Pluto and Peleus, Bacchus and Ino, Theseus, Erechtheus, and several scenes from the Trojan war.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds several pieces from the Poniatowski collection.

An engraved amethyst ring signed ΓΝΑΙΟϹ (Gnaios), showing Mark Antony in profile, had in 1968 been published and praised by gem expert John Boardman, and was widely reproduced in books as an ancient Roman masterpiece. The ring was acquired in 2001 by the J. Paul Getty Museum, and in 2009 exhibited as an antique. When archaeologist Gertrud Platz [de] saw it, having just written a book about Poniatowski gem engraver Giovanni Calandrelli, she recognized it from a 19th century plaster impression she had seen among the Poniatowski collection. Platz located photographs of the impression and a page in Calandrelli's notebook listing a gem he made of Mark Antony signed Gnaios. In fact, the "Gnaios" ring was a Poniatowski gem by Calandrelli; Getty curator Kenneth Lapatin tracked down the ring's full provenance.

A Poniatowski carnelian depicting the "Head of Hipparchus" was included in Christie's 1939 auction, but there is no later record of it. Astronomer William Henry Smyth acknowledged in 1842 making an impression of "the head of Hipparchus, from the Poniatowski-gem, intended as a vignette illustration of his work". His 1844 book, A Cycle of Celestial Objects, used exactly such a vignette on its title page. This image has subsequently been repeatedly copied and reproduced, including on a 1965 Greek postage stamp commemorating the Eugenides Planetarium in Athens.

The National Museum in Kraków holds two pieces that appear to be replicas or forgeries of the Poniatowski gems, rather than the original gems themselves. One of them, in agate, depicts Hebe as a young woman wearing a chiton with her hair in a bun, pouring wine or nectar from a jug into a cup held by Jupiter, as a half-undressed old man, set in scenery of clouds. It appears to be a crude copy of a sardonyx piece whose plaster cast is held at the University of Oxford, missing its forged signature ("Chromios") and some details in the carving. Another piece in the museum, also likely a copy of a Poniatowski gem, consists of a red jasper stone, carved with a snake with a lion's head and the lettering "vot sol cer", set in a bronze ring.

## Catalogs

* Poniatowski, Stanislas (c. 1830), Catalogue des pierres gravées antiques de S. A. le Prince Stanislas Poniatowski, vol. 1, Florence: Guillaume Piatti
* Poniatowski, Stanislas (1832), Catalogue des pierres gravées antiques de S. A. le Prince Stanislas Poniatowski, vol. 2, Florence: Guillaume Piatti
* Poniatowski, Stanislas (1833), Catalogue des pierres gravées antiques de S. A. le Prince Stanislas Poniatowski, vol. 3, Florence: Guillaume Piatti
* Tyrrell, John (1841), Explanatory catalogue of the proof-impressions of the antique gems possessed by the late Prince Poniatowski, and now in the possession of John Tyrrell, esq., London: Henry Graves
* Prendeville, James (1859), Photographic facsimiles of the antique gems formerly possessed by the late Prince Poniatowski, 2nd series, London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts
