The Photo Library at the Art History Institute of the Jagiellonian University holds the oldest Polish photographic archive in the domain of art history, whose beginnings date back to the 1880s. The wide-ranging and valuable holdings of the Photo Library - which for many years had been used for purely utilitarian purposes, as a teaching tool of art history - were until recently little known as far as their historical and photographic significance was concerned. The situation was partially changed thanks to a research project entitled ‘Photographs of the Works of Polish Art in the Collection of the Photo Library at the Art History Institute of the Jagiellonian University: A Scholarly Examination, Digitisation and Publication of a Catalogue’, funded by a grant of the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education awarded as a part of the National Programme for the Development of the Humanities, carried out from 2014 to 2019. The aim of the project was to possibly most comprehensively examine a group of approximately 19,000 photographic prints from the Photo Library’s holdings, which represent historic buildings and works of art from the area of Poland within its pre-partitions and current borders. The investigation encompassed identification of the objects represented in photographs, determining the date of the photographs’ execution, their authorship and provenance as well as the photographic technique. Detailed descriptions of photographic prints were made, including signatures of photographers, proprietary marks (e.g. stamps and inventory numbers), inscriptions written on the prints, and retouching. All data was entered into a database and, along with digital images of the photographs, will be made available on the Photo Library's web site (at: www.fototeka.ihs.uj.edu.pl). The present volume deals with the oldest and most valuable part of the holdings investigated during the project: a group of over 1,700 photographs executed in the nineteenth or at the very beginning of the twentieth century. The year 1900 mentioned in the title is only a nominal terminus, as in many cases the precise date of execution was impossible to determine. Thus, an additional criterion for inclusion had to be adopted, that of the technique of the print’s execution, resulting in the catalogue comprising all positives made on albumen paper (albumen prints), a photographic technique that was predominantly in use precisely in the nineteenth century. The main part of the present volume is made up of a catalogue of photographs amounting to 1,741 items. The entries follow alphabetical order of place names in which the photographed objects are currently located (photographs of objects which were lost or destroyed have been catalogued under their last known whereabouts). It must be noted that photographs of copies or other kinds of reproductions of original works of art (e.g. plaster casts, drawings, architectural designs etc.) were treated as if they were photographs of the originals. For instance, a photograph of a drawing depicting the tomb slab of Piotr Kmita was catalogued under views of Cracow Cathedral, as it is where the slab itself is located. Entries dealing with photographs of objects whose whereabouts could not be determined were listed separately at the back of the catalogue. The catalogue is preceded by three introductory essays. The first one, by Wojciech Walanus, entitled The History of the Photographic Collection of the Art History Cabinet at the Jagiellonian University (1881-1921), aims to describe the historical circumstances in which the core of the present collection of the Photo Library was formed, and the ways by which the photographs included in the catalogue were acquired. The paper begins with an outline of the history of the Art History Cabinet at the Jagiellonian University, an institution that was a precursor of the Photo Library. The Cabinet was established by Marian Sokołowski (1839-1911), the Jagiellonian University’s first professor of art history [Fig. 1, p. 9]. Already as Privatdozent, or junior lecturer (he submitted his Habilitation in 1879), Sokołowski employed in his lectures photographs, prints and illustrated publications, either his own or borrowed from Cracow’s libraries and museums. In 1881, having been awarded a grant from the Austrian Imperial and Royal Ministry of Religion and Education (k. k. Ministerium für Kultus und Unterricht), Sokołowski started to methodically assemble a collection of teaching tools which - a year later, after he had been appointed professor of art history and thus a chair of art history had been established - was given an independent status of the ‘scientific apparatus of art history’. For the next two years the collection was kept in Sokołowski’s private apartment, then, from 1884, it was provisionally housed in the chemistry department (currently the Wróblewski College) and finally, in 1887, it found a permanent location in the University’s then only recently completed, brand new headquarters, the Collegium Novum. Located in five rooms on the edifice’s ground floor, the Cabinet of Art History was arranged strictly according to the design of Sokołowski who had conceived it as a sort of museum of copies and reproductions of the works of art [Figs 3-4, pp. 12-13]. A turning point in the Cabinet’s history occurred in 1898, when it was combined with the Archaeological Cabinet, established in 1867 by Józef Łepkowski (1826-1894), the first professor of archaeology at the Jagiellonian University [Fig. 5, p. 14]. The holdings of the Archaeological Cabinet encompassed various ‘antiquities’ (excavated objects, artworks and memorabilia), books, prints, drawings and photographs, usually donated by eminent Polish collectors (such as Edward Rastawiecki and Władysław Czartoryski, among others). Sokołowski wanted to combine the Cabinet of Art History with the Archaeological Cabinet into a single ‘Institute of Art and Archaeology’ that would serve as an independent University museum under the immediate authority of the University’s Senate. When Łepkowski retired in 1893, Sokołowski temporarily took the holdings of the Archaeological Cabinet in his care. The situation was resolved by the ministry’s decision of 1898 which established the ‘Combined Collections of Art History and Archaeology’ with Sokołowski as their head and Piotr Bieńkowski, a professor of archaeology, as his deputy. The formal union, however, did not result in an actual fusion of the holdings of both Cabinets, each of which had been still assigned separate funds and kept its own inventory books. In 1921 the Archaeological Cabinet and the Cabinet of Art History were liquidated and their collections were distributed among four new entities: Seminar of Classical Archaeology, Department of Prehistoric Archaeology, the University Museum of Art and Archaeology, and Department of Art History. The last institution was given books, photographs and reproductions dealing with ‘art of the Christian era’, including those that used to belong to the Archaeological Cabinet. The Seminar of Classical Archaeology, in turn, took materials related to ancient art that had belonged to the Cabinet of Art History. In this way the ‘scientific apparatus’ assembled by Sokołowski was dispersed. A part of it that ended up in the Department (and since 1956, Institute) of Art History has been now kept in the Institute’s Photo Library (photographs, scarce drawings and prints) and Library (books). The second part of the essay deals with the origins of the Cabinet’s of Art History photographic collection. Data provided by the account book from 1881-1899 and, regrettably incomplete, inventories from 1881-1892 and 1897-1930, make it clear that photographs were mainly donated to the Cabinet by private individuals and institutions. An important role at that was played by Sokołowski’s private contacts. The major benefactor of the Cabinet was Sokołowski’s collector friend, Count Karol Lanckoroński [Fig. 2, p. 11], who, from 1883 to 1912, donated about 2,800 photographic prints, mostly related to Italian art. Among important donors were also the writer Julian Klaczko, who bequeathed over 1,300 photographs to the Cabinet, and Sokołowski himself, who gave a total of approximately 900 photographic prints. The most important institution that supported the Cabinet was the Commission on Art History established at the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1873. Since 1892 Sokołowski had been its chairman and it was most likely through his good offices that photographs or drawings, previously presented at the Commission’s meetings and used for reproduction in its published Transactions, were donated to the University’s collection. These donations totalled almost 1,200 photographic prints related for the most part to Polish art. A far less important role in the shaping of the collection was played by purchases which were possible owing to the already mentioned grant of the Ministry of Religion and Education: only approximately 920 photographs were acquired in this way from 1887 to 1917. As a result of the 1921 division of the collections of the Archaeological Cabinet and the Cabinet of Art History, the latter was divested of reproductions of ancient art. The division, however, had also some advantages, providing the Photo Library’s current collection with about 180 nineteenth-century photographs which once used to belong to the Archaeological Cabinet, including about 70 prints of particularly high value, dating from the 1860s and 1870s, from the private collection of Józef Łepkowski (all of which have been included in the present catalogue). The final part of the text discusses the place of photography within the structure of the Cabinet of Art History which consisted of four sections: ‘Furniture and furnishings’, ‘Casts’, ‘Books and publications’, and ‘Photographs and prints’. The last section included also drawings, watercolours and photomechanical reproductions, which very well reflects the diversity of media used by art historians in the second half of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is known that Sokołowski set as much store by acquiring high-quality photographic prints as by procuring copper engravings and chromolithographs. Still, this does not alter the fact that photography was the most numerous and most extensively used medium in Sokołowski’s Cabinet. The photographs were most likely organised by epochs, artistic genres and countries, and within each section they were probably arranged alphabetically according to the names of artists or places. Photographic prints, generally kept in cabinets or drawers, were made available in the ‘Study Room’ [Fig. 3, p. 12], but some of them – selected with regard to their subject matter - were permanently displayed in the Cabinet’s rooms - hung on the walls near plaster casts of ancient sculpture [Fig. 4, p. 13]. The arrangement of the Cabinet’s interiors in many respects resembled that of the so-called Photographic Room in Karol Lanckoroński’s palace at Rozdół [Fig. 7, p. 22], which may be explained by Sokołowski’s close contacts with the count. The second essay, by Magdalena Kunińska (Photography as an Epistemic Medium of Art History between the History of Culture and the History of Style), was based on historical data provided in Wojciech Walanus’s study of the history of the Jagiellonian University’s Cabinet of Art History, which focuses in particular on its photographic collection, while methodologically it refers to performative properties of collections as defined by Horst Bredekamp, among others. In this particular case, performative features of the collection concern the ways in which scholarly identity of art history was constructed. While referring to the basic tenets of the so-called archival turn, the author considers the photographic collection assembled by the subsequent generations of Cracow art historians as an axiologically opaque epistemic residue which allows to trace the changes in the attitude towards the principles of art historical practice that had occurred up to 1918. In this way, she makes an attempt to show the nuances of the nineteenth-century panopticism which are discernible in the changing media of representing a work of art, from a graphic tracing to photography, and in the changing systems of organising knowledge – from synoptic pictorial broadsheets to individual photographs – this being a change in the means of communication. By combining the history of the development of photography and its ascent to the position of a medium that had dominated reproductive techniques, with the history of art history’s achieving the status of a scholarly discipline, the paper specifies a methodological transition from the history of culture to formal analysis, which can be seen in the achievements of the Cabinet’s founder, the first professor of art history, Marian Sokołowski, and his successors. The main part of the paper, entitled Art History on the Road to Scholarliness, focuses on discussion about the value of photography as art, with William Henry Fox Talbot as a staunch supporter of the new medium and Charles Baudelaire, Henri Delaborde and Charles Blanc as its critics. An analysis of their views reveals that the differences in assessing the merits of photography were the result of a conflict between two modes of perceiving the reality: one that was artistic, and the other that was ‘cool’ or ‘objective’ and, consequently, scholarly. This debate serves as a background to present the views of Marian Sokołowski who advanced an idea that art-historical research should meet the standards of scholarliness through objectivity and lack of emotional involvement. Putting aside the polemical content of the critical statements on photography, of which disjointed fragments were often used in debates, the author demonstrates that the description of the properties of photography coincided on both sides of the dispute when it was related to the medium’s objectivity and lack of individuality, whereas differences consisted in the assessment of the objectivity itself. For the critics of photography, who considered it to be ‘blind to the realm of the spirit’, its objectivity was a major fault which undermined its position as an art. These views, however, derived from a particular concept of creativity, which emphasised transformational capabilities of imagination. Yet the same critics recognized photography as a documentary medium which made it possible to view historic objects that no longer survived or were far away, and in those cases they positively assessed the objectivity of photographs. A confrontation of the two worldviews: the artistic and the scholarly one, prefaces a discussion about the introduction of photography into the practice of art history and its role in establishing ‘laboratories’ of art-historical investigation by Hermann Grimm, Giovanni Morelli and Jacob Burckhardt. Apart from offering a possibility of juxtaposing and comparing artworks, photography was additionally presented as a medium that guaranteed the so-called positive basis for research, a quality that was crucial for the discipline’s scientific status. The photographic technique, as a Hilfsmittel (or research aid) of art history, was treated at the same time as one that enabled to view objects without personal involvement, and correctly, since otherwise, when seen using natural perception (‘with the naked eye’), these objects would have been seen stereoscopically. The author, following Jonathan Crary, associates this form of perception of the world with certain aspects of the nineteenth-century panopticism. A separate treatment was given to the question of the feasibility of using photography for reproductions of painting and sculpture. Here, the views of Heinrich Wölfflin and Hermann Grimm, both of whom emphasised limitations of the photographic medium for the reproduction of sculpture, have been analysed in comparison with the history of the development of art-historical research method. Concluding paragraphs provide an analysis of a transition from the paradigm of typological research – consisting in, as Sokołowski would have it, identifying the ‘lineage and development’ in art (that is, a kind of research associated with the idea of presenting a comprehensive view of the history of art), based on ‘positive foundations’ – to a formal analysis focused on less numerous groups of objects. The author posits that this turn is reflected in the statistics and structure of the photographic collection of the Jagiellonian University’s Art History Cabinet and later Department, as the study materials of its subsequent professors that accumulated in the collection with the passage of time were becoming increasingly detailed. The collection of the Art History Cabinet, this nineteenth-century ‘imaginary museum’ - as it may be called (with full awareness of the anachronism of André Malraux’s expression), since it meets the requirements of building a canon and displaying ‘without walls’ the sum of human imagination (regardless of any exceptions from this comprehensive survey) - is a historical phenomenon which reflects the intertwining of the history of art history and the development of photographic techniques, a fact that fully justifies Donald Preziosi’s assertion, used in the opening phrase of the present text, that ‘Art history as we know it today is the child of photography’. The last essay, by Anna Bednarek (The Photography of Historic Monuments and Artworks on Polish Lands in the Nineteenth Century. An Outline of the Problem), immediately relates to the subject matter of the group of photographic prints shown in the present catalogue. The invention of photography made it possible to get acquainted with images of even far away objects, its degree of faithfulness surpassing at the same time all previously employed techniques. Reasons for executing, collecting and disseminating images of artworks and historic monuments were numerous: from an entirely individual wish to preserve an important or beautiful view, to scholarly research which in Polish lands flourished particularly in Cracow and was intended to result in a study on the history of Polish art. Therefore the question of photographic reproductions brings together a number of problems, related not only to photography and its history, but also to visual culture in the broadest sense. Research into this problem that has been conducted in Western Europe and the USA since fairly recently, resulted in publications and museum exhibitions. A growing interest in the topic can also be seen in Poland, but it is only rarely that it yields separate studies; the problem under discussion is far more often treated on the margin of papers dealing with other topics. For reasons of technological constraints, the earliest photographs (daguerreotypes), both such that were brought to Polish lands and such that were taken on site, represented mainly architecture. As soon as it was possible to execute photographic portraits, it was this genre that became the mainstay of the majority of Polish photographic ateliers. Architecture and isolated objects began to be photographed on a larger scale starting from the 1850s, when the negative-positive process took root. Photographers, working on their own or commissioned, took single shots and compiled sets and albums of photographs [Fig. 2, p. 44], but not without difficulties. And it was precisely because of these difficulties that there were relatively few amateur photographers in the second half of the nineteenth century, and it was only thanks to and along with the introduction of technological improvements that their number began to grow. Owing to photomechanical processes, such as collotype, it became, in turn, possible to reproduce photographs using the printing press. The emergence of photography and its subsequent gaining of popularity were evaluated by critics and journalists, but more extensive analyses of the phenomenon on Polish lands were very rare (an exception being Józef Ignacy Kraszewski who wrote on photography relatively early and fairly often). If Polish critics addressed the question of application of photography to documenting the works of art, their opinions were usually favourable to the new medium, although, especially in the early days, there were also cases of criticism related, for the most part, to photography’s purely imitative character, among others. One of the areas in which photography found wide application was reproduction of artworks done by contemporary artists, both the lesser- and better-known ones. Among the former were, for example, Saturnin Świerzyński and Polikarp Gumiński [Fig. 3, p. 47] and among the latter, e.g. Jan Matejko and Artur Grottger. Photographs of their works were used as a means of promoting and advertising their art, enabling the audiences to become acquainted with the current production of the artists. In case of some artists, e.g. Grottger, photographs played an important role in the reception of works reproduced using this technique. Also scholarly circles became interested in photography as a means of documenting historic artefacts, because a collection of their images was considered indispensable to preparing a study on the history of Polish art. It is to the Warsaw photographer and amateur researcher, Karol Beyer, that we owe a number of pioneering initiatives in this regard, as he believed the scholarly application of the new medium to be its most important asset. And although it was not without difficulties that his plans were brought to fruition, mainly because of scarce interest of the public, he had managed to put together, e.g. albums with photographs from exhibitions of antiquities in Warsaw (1856-1857) [Fig. 5, p. 50] and Cracow (1858-1859). And it was most likely thanks to one of Beyer’s albums that the scholars associated with the Section on Archaeology and Fine Arts of the Cracow Learned Society became aware of the reproductive potential of photography. In the Cracow milieu, an important part in recording historic objects using the new technique was played by the scholar Józef Łepkowski who was instrumental in recording in photographs the wall monument to Veit Stoß the Younger at Ząbkowice Śląskie (Germ. Frankenstein; 1869) and the so-called antiquities of Czeszewo (1872) [Fig. 8, p. 52], among others. These reproductions are excellent examples of the manifold functions photographs served in the practice of scholarly research: as a source of information and a tool used for recording and disseminating knowledge about an object. In Lvov, in turn, photographic recording of historic monuments was championed especially by Stanisław Kunasiewicz who was deeply involved in the cause of their restoration. With the passage of time, photography became an almost standard tool used in art-historical research, and at the end of the nineteenth century some scholars (e.g. Stanisław Tomkowicz) were able to take pictures on their own. At that time amateur researchers and art lovers assembled collections of images, some of which were in the form of photographs. Such was the case of the holdings of Maria Celestyna Boczkowska and Ambroży Grabowski in which photographs appeared alongside images executed in other techniques [Fig. 9, p. 53]. Photographic prints started to be featured in collections of public institutions (e.g. Archaeological Cabinet of the Jagiellonian University); they were usually donated by photographers, artists and scholars. Reproductions of artworks were executed and used not only in the scholarly milieu; on the contrary: quantitatively, of greater importance was probably the strictly private sphere in which photographs were used as personal memorabilia, gifts and decorations. The varied forms of photographic prints attest to the fact that they were intended for a wide spectrum of audiences: next to expensive albums, accessible for a narrow group who could afford them, there were photographs, such as stereoscopic images and in the handy carte-de-visite format, published to cater to the possibly widest audiences. Photographers advertised their work to potential customers by exhibiting it, for example, in shop windows, and by participating in World’s Fairs.