Two albums of drawings by Lombard masters of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, from the estate of the Clary-Aldringen family

Two albums of drawings by Lombard masters of the Renaissance period (sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries), the contents of which are now in museums in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, constitute one of the most valuable collections of drawings preserved in Bohemia from the seventeenth century. Apparently originally the property of Antonio Maria Viani (1555/60–1630), it remains impossible to identify with certainty who collected the drawings at some time before 1676 and pasted them into the two albums, or how they came to be in the possession of the Clary-Aldringen family, from whose hands they eventually passed into public ownership. The aim of this article is to trace the records of this extraordinary collection in the possession of the Clary-Aldringen family since 1676, and its fate after 1945. While one of the albums was later dismembered and the constituent drawings were variously treated, we have been able to trace almost the whole of this collection.