Copy of Princess Sibyl's necklace
At the Amber Museum in Krakow you can see an exceptional exhibit: a copy of the amber necklace of Duchess Sibylle of Brzeg. While making it, Marta Włodarska discovered that the “original” from 1610 on display at the Malbork Castle Museum is not an original at all…
The history of this discovery may not be as fascinating as Dan Brown’s novels, but it is certainly very interesting – especially for amber lovers. In 2009, the Museum of the Silesian Piasts in Brzeg asked the young designer Marta Włodarska to make a replica of the amber necklace of the Duchess of Brest, Dorota. It was to complement the reconstruction of the 700th anniversary of the creation of the Duchy of Brest, celebrated in 2012, the full costume of the duchess, together with items found in her sarcophagus: footwear, silver belt and gold jewellery.
Wanting to carry out the commission as professionally as possible, the designer began collecting documentation about the necklace. She started with the Malbork Castle Museum, where a necklace labelled as having once belonged to Duchess Sibylle of Brzeg, dated 1610, was on display. Imagine her surprise when, in the famous 1937 book by the eminent amber expert Alfred Rohde, Amber – a German material. Artistic processing from the Middle Ages to the 18th century, she found a photograph of Sibylle’s necklace that looked different from the one in Malbork (in the 1930s the necklace was in the collection of the Silesian Museum of Applied Arts and Antiquities in Wrocław). The two pieces differed considerably in the shape of the beads, their size and their cut.
Marta Włodarska, however, decided to make a copy of the necklace from the Malbork collection. She presented it for the first time during the International Amber, Jewelery and Gemstones Fair in Gdansk in March 2012. Although it was only a copy, it still aroused great interest combined with several purchase offers.
At the exhibition in the Castle Museum in Malbork, we will no longer find the Princess Sibyl’s necklace, but “a fragment of a necklace – 10 beads, Gdańsk, 17th century (?)”. “To my knowledge, there were many such necklaces at that time, so it really will be difficult to determine clearly whether a given necklace or its fragments belonged to Princess Sybilla. Certainly, however, our beads are not the same as the necklace reproduced in 1937 by Alfred Rohde “- explained Dr. Anna Sobecka, guardian of the amber collection of the Castle Museum in Malbork.
More on this:
A copy of Duchess Sibylle’s amber necklace
Original – Copy – Compilation
