Thirteenth International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

The return of the Polish/Stockholm roll, was by no means an unprecedented event. In 1974, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme handed over the watercolour that had been looted from Warsaw by the Swedish Army during the so-called “Deluge” (1656) to Piotr Jaroszewicz, head of the Polish government. The almost 15-metre long artwork depicts the wedding procession of King Sigismund III Vasa and Constance Habsburg entering Kraków in December 1605. In 2002, at the Warsaw Royal Castle an exhibition that presented the history of Polish-Swedish relations. One of its threads focused on the issue of war trophies robbed by the Swedish Army from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The issue resurfaced five years later as a leading theme of the exhibition and workshop at the Swedish Royal Arsenal (Livrustkammaren). In the course of the debate, the question of how to talk about war trophies as museum artefacts was raised, as well as the directions for future research on war trophies. Both exhibitions presented various types of objects that were typically looted by Swedish armies—from everyday objects to precious items from palaces’ interior design. The examples of studies on Swedish war trophies looted during the seventeenth century armed conflicts with the Commonwealth demonstrated above do not represent the extent of scholarly interest in the subject matter. There were many research projects that aimed to explore the subject, or plans to produce a catalogue of war trophies. This paper presents a new research project considering 17th-century war-booty looted from Poland.