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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Lycurgos, post: 161454, member: 2659&quot;]Your print is from the work <i>Suecia antiqua et hodierna</i> with engravings made between 1667 and 1715. The work was intiated and carried through by the fortifications officer, amateur artist and architect Erik Dahlbergh (1625-1703). After his death the work was continued by the Royal Chancellery in Sweden. All in all it consists of 353 engravings displaying 469 motifs of 17th-century Sweden. The master drawings were mostly made by Dahlbergh whereas the engravings were made by some twenty French and Dutch engravers.</p><p><br /></p><p>Your print shows the coat of arms of the province of Blekinge in southern Sweden. The drawing was composed by Elias Brenner, the last director of the work before it was halted due to Sweden&#039;s increasing difficulties in the Great Nordic War. The work was never finished according to plan, and, apart from the coat of arms, in Blekinge only the city of Karlskrona together with its surrounding fortifications was finished.</p><p><br /></p><p>The &quot;runes&quot; are from a site called Runamo häll (<i>häll</i> meaning flat rock). The motif is copied from a wood cut in <i>Runir seu Danica literatura antiqvissima</i> (1651), written by the Danish antiquarian Ole Worms. For many centuries it was believed that they were runes and there were mythological stories that the person who could decipher them was the rightful king of Denmark. In the engraving you can, e.g., read the word &quot;Lund&quot;, the name of the old Danish arch-diocese. However, in the 19th century it was shown that the &quot;runes&quot; are in fact natural cracks in the rock.</p><p><br /></p><p>Johannes van den Aveelen was a dutchman who moved to Sweden in 1698 to work on Suecia antiqua. He was the most productive of all the engravers and finished a total of 143 plates. From 1715 he did not receive any salary from the Crown but tried to make a living from private commissions. He died in Stockholm in 1728.</p><p><br /></p><p>The work was printed in two editions in the 18th Century: c. 1721-1728, and 1751-1766. To see from which edition your print originates you have to look at the water-marks. A key to identifying the water-marks are given in a recent essay by Börje Magnusson: &quot;Tryckningen&nbsp; av Suecia Antiqua&quot;, <i>Biblis</i>, 73 (2016). (It can be downloaded <a href="https://suecia.kb.se/F/8PJI5P278PIQRS3NJAFTKCMRQN28IE5CBRYDRKTXHRB35BIS62-07477?func=file&amp;file_name=las-mer-sah" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://suecia.kb.se/F/8PJI5P278PIQRS3NJAFTKCMRQN28IE5CBRYDRKTXHRB35BIS62-07477?func=file&amp;file_name=las-mer-sah" rel="nofollow">here</a>; unfortunately only in Swedish.)</p><p><br /></p><p>All the engravings and preserved master drawings relating to <i>Suecia antiqua</i> can be studied and freely downloaded as high-resolution images from the National Library of Sweden: <a href="https://suecia.kb.se/" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://suecia.kb.se/" rel="nofollow">https://suecia.kb.se/</a> (An English-language interface will be launched on the website later this year.)[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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