Lothair Francis of Schönborn

Count Lothar Franz von Schönborn (1655-1729), Prince bishop of Bamberg, Elector and Archbishop of Mainz, and as such Chancellor of the Reich, was the second most powerful man after the German Emperor. In 1705, he began collecting paintings and ten years later, in 1715, he installed part of his growing collection for the first time in Castle Weissenstein in Pommersfelden (Upper Franconia), which he had built between 1711 and 1718. Weissenstein was to become the place for official functions. Another part of the collection was preserved in the family castle Gaibach in Lower Franconia, which served as his private residence. A catalogue of this part of the Schönborn collection was published by its director, the painter Jan Joost van Cossiau (1664-1734) in 1721. Count Lothar Franz liked to compare his collection of about 1000 paintings to the Imperial collections in Vienna and to the Palatine collection in Düsseldorf. As early as 1715 he expressed the wish to have a choice selection engraved. This may have prompted Rudolf Bys (1662-1738), his curator and court artist, to prepare an inventory of the collection for private circulation. Published in 1719, it has proven to be most reliable and trustworthy. Nevertheless, the count withdrew Bys’s catalogue shortly thereafter. Today only two copies are known to exist, one in the library in Ansbach, the former library of the castle, the other one in Bamberg. (Despite its rarity, Bys’s catalogue is known in the scholarly world and always quoted in more recent literature discussing paintings in the Schönborn collection.) Katharina Bott now re-publishes Bys’s catalogue with its lengthy, laudatory introduction, updates the location and bibliography of the paintings, although not always up to the more recent literature (John Ingamells’s catalogue of the Wallace collection of 1992 would be preferable to the 1920 catalogue she cites), and at times rather haphazardly. (One might also have expected a reference to the exhibition held in 1989 in Nürnberg, Die Grafen von Schönborn.) There are concordances at the end to Bys (Bott and Bys numbers correspond only through 146, the paintings in the gallery), and to Theodor von Frimmel, who published the last catalogue of the Schönborn collection in 1894; an index lists artists and subjects by page rather than inventory numbers, and omits present locations of paintings sold in 1867. Katharina Bott renders a great service to the reader by reproducing 250 paintings from photographs taken between 1934 and 1937 by Foto Marburg. Two illustrations of interior views of the Galerie and the Marmor-Saal in Castle Weissenstein by Salomon Kleiner, published in 1728, give remarkably clear images of the paintings and illustrate their dense, frame-to-frame installation. Bys’s inventory follows the order of the rooms where the paintings were exhibited (rather than in alphabetical order by artist as Frimmel’s 1894 catalogue), beginning with the principal room of the collection, the actual gallery (Galerie), followed by the Marble Hall (Marmor-Saal), the audience room (Audienz-Zimmer), the private living quarters (Retirade), the bed chamber of the Elector, the small adjoining room (today’s ‘Blumenzimmer’ or ‘room of flowers’), the chapel and additional living rooms. The catalogue ends with a list of the ceiling decorations, among them in the grand staircase by Rudolf (Rudolph) Bys himself (Bott 482-97). The majority of the paintings in the Schönborn collection are by Dutch and Flemish artists, about half as many are from the Italian school, very few are by German artists, and only about a dozen by French artists. Among painters represented by more than five paintings we find Bruegel, most likely younger members of the Brueghel family, Van Dyck, Honthorst, Rembrandt, Rubens, Weenix, and Wouwerman. For the Italian school we find names like Albani, Giordano, and Titian, for the German school Bys himself as well as Hulsman and Seiter. More than half the subjects represent my