Weltliches Silber 2: Katalog der Sammlung des Schweizerischen Nationalmuseums, Zurich

Apollo, Nov, 2003 by Timothy Schroder

Hanspeter Lanz Schweizerisches Nationalmuseum, Zurich, 2001, ISBN 3 908025 34 6, 160 [euro]

The silver collection of the Landesmuseum in Zurich first reached an international audience in 1977, with the publication of Alain Gruber's catalogue (Weltliches Silber, Verlag Berichthaus, Zurich). For those not intimately familiar with the museum, it was a revelation both for the range and depth of the collection and for the outstanding quality of many of its objects. The publication itself was something of a milestone too, owing to the clarity of its presentation and design, even though it might have been regretted that some of the entries were not more discursive.

It will come as no surprise that since that publication the museum has continued to collect. What does surprise, however, is the sheer scale of its acquisitiveness. In less than twenty five years, the collection has expanded by over eleven hundred objects, the equivalent of some forty-five new acquisitions a year, an enviable achievement for a specialist department by any standards and one that has enabled many of the gaps and imbalances in the collection to be redressed. It is probably fair to say, however, that the collective impression of the objects documented in this book, impressive though some of them are, is that they lack the gravitas of the earlier volume's star pieces. The great renaissance ewer and dish, the series of virtuoso mounted Schatzkammer pieces or the long series of quirky guild cups that distinguished the first catalogue have few counterparts in this volume. To an extent this is inevitable, both because the book documents a shorter period in the museum's collecting history and because the market over the last quarter century has been less awash with great objects than in previous decades. But it evidently also reflects the priorities of the curators, who have set themselves the task of expanding hitherto relatively neglected areas and of achieving a more comprehensive representation of certain regional types.

Nevertheless, there is no doubt as to the importance of the most notable of these acquisitions. The autograph production of the great baroque goldsmith, Hanspeter Oeri of Zurich, for example, was represented previously by a single minor piece, but can now be studied through four highly important objects, two beautifully modelled figures of walking horses and a pair of tazzas with embossed decoration of outstanding quality. Such pieces are not just sensational but do much to substantiate the importance of Zurich as a great centre of goldsmiths' work in a region often overshadowed by the international reputation of Augsburg and Nuremberg.

Other areas in which the recent growth of the collection has excelled are Swiss spoons from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century and the works of the late nineteenth-century firm, Bossard of Lucerne. The latter were often derided by previous generations as mere fakes, but the objects that are described in this catalogue do much to correct this view, allowing one to see Bossard as among the most important champions of the late nineteenth-century Historismus style. It is in the spoons and cutlery section, however, the book will in many ways prove most useful to collectors, dealers and curators. Amounting numerically to more than half the catalogue, the careful documentation and identification of marks on some seven hundred items has resulted, when added to the marks reproduced in the previous volume, in what is now probably the best published resource on the subject of Swiss goldsmiths' marks available.

The present publication is broadly speaking a companion volume to its predecessor, both in the style of its layout and the organisation of the text. There is much to be said for this in that it is both clear and economical. A significant difference between the two, however, is that in the present volume the marks are reproduced not only in the form of an index, but also against the objects themselves, a change which is described in the text as 'user friendly'. This it undoubtedly is, but at the cost of appearing in places intrusive and over designed. In every case the reproduction of marks rather irritatingly overlaps the main image, an effect that is made worse by the marks being digitally scanned and often barely legible. In terms of the text, a minor point of criticism which can be levelled against both books is the lack of systematically presented provenance information. It is true that coats of arms are identified when possible and that the early history of major objects is described, but there is a sense of incompleteness in not having this for lesser pieces too, in not knowing which objects were acquired by gift and which by purchase and in not knowing when they entered the collection.