Sunday, December 01, 2024

Two striking copies at the St. Gallen Abbey Library

My wife Andrea bought us day-passes for the Swiss railway system for my birthday in August, so on this cold December Sunday we took the train to St. Gallen to visit the Abbey Library. Two objects on display there really struck me, and both are copies. The first is the St. Gallen globe from the 16th century, which is 2.33 meters high. But in 1712, troops from Zurich and Bern stole it when they plundered the Abbey, and the original is still in Zurich. The second is a seventeenth-century copy of a painting from the Basel Art Museum: Hans Holbein's sixteenth-century painting "The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb". (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 1 December 2024) 

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