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An early nineteenth-century manuscript is preserved in the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków. This document in Italian, entitled ‘Breve Descrizione del Museo Trivulzio’, describes the contents of a collection of an aristocratic family in Milan, as seen shortly after the death of its builder – Don Carlo Trivulzio (1715-1789). The author compares it to a published text in French by Aubin-Louis Millin, and publishes up-to-date descriptions of the engraved gems evoked in the manuscript. Thanks to various sources, five of those seven cameos and intaglios can also be illustrated together for the first time.

In the first half of the 19th century, the Prince Stanislas Poniatowski (1754–1833) collection of engraved gems was considered to be one of the most outstanding known assemblages. However, its sale at Christie’s in 1839 was a disaster, as the cabinet turned out to include almost only neo-classical specimens and, thus, half of the gems did not go under the hammer. But these intaglios and cameos, and especially the themes they bear, portray in their beauty an effort to re-create a lost neo-classical world as reflected in the texts of Homer, Vergil, and other ancient authors. In contrary to other works on the Poniatowski gems, this paper focuses not on the collection itself, but on its impact on the later gem engraving. It presents two intaglios from the collection of the National Museum in Krakow. The first presents a scene of Hebe pouring out nectar for Jupiter (with an eagle behind him). The second depicts a crowned snake-god with the incorrect Latin inscription: VOT•SOL•CER. They are faithful copies of two Poniatowski gems. In fact, the first gem testifies to the great contribution of the Poniatowski collection to the reception of Classical culture, while the other is a falsification of the original which reflects a later collector’s aim to possess a ‘Poniatowski gem’.

The National Museum in Krakow contains an outstanding set of gems collected by Constantine Schmidt-Ciążyński (1818-1889). Within this extensive group of objects, two very rare intaglios bearing a particular intriguing motif, the double-headed device, stand out from the rest. Since the very beginning, scholars have interpreted this kind of depiction differently and many different hypotheses have been drawn. This paper aims to explain the meaning of this strange iconography and from whence it originated.