„At the trade fair, I showed a reproduction of a handmade necklace from the Malbork museum collection, even though for a year now I've had the conviction that it is not the original, said Marta Włodarska. And she added: In the Jagiellonian University Library in Kraków, I found the only photograph of this necklace and its description in a 1937 book by Alfred Rohde; to my surprise, at first glance it looks completely different from the one in Malbork. The cited book is Amber – A German Material: Artistic Working from the Middle Ages to the 18th Century by Alfred Rohde, director of the Castle Museum in Königsberg before the Second World War. The necklace of Duchess Sibylle Marie presented in it was at that time – that is, in the 1930s – in the collections of the Silesian Museum of Applied and Ancient Art in Wrocław. At the current stage of work, I assume that it is precisely in this book that the photograph of the original is to be found, says the designer. The two examples differ significantly from one another – the beads not only have a different shape (irregular oval versus regular spheres), but also different dimensions (a 1cm difference in the diameter of the largest amber bead), and they are also cut differently.
Marta Włodarska presented a replica of a necklace housed in the Malbork Museum in Gdańsk. „I began work on recreating the necklace 1.5 years earlier. I had already purchased amber, which I appropriately cut to create facets, in accordance with what I saw in Malbork,” she explains. Although it is only a copy, it still generated a great deal of interest, including even a few offers to buy. Now, however, the designer has decided to make another replica based on the design presented in Alfred Rohde's book, in order to show the differences at the Gold Silver Time trade fair in Warsaw in October and present both necklaces – the one from Malbork and the one from Alfred Rohde's book.
In 2009, Marta Włodarska was approached to create a replica of Duchess Sybilla's amber necklace by the Museum of the Silesian Piasts in Brzeg, which in 2012 marked the 700th anniversary of the establishment of the Duchy of Brzeg. The necklace is intended to be a complement to the full outfit of the Duchess being recreated for the occasion, along with items found in her sarcophagus: footwear, a silver belt and gold jewellery.
„Previously, literature indeed stated that the amber necklace in the Malbork collections belonged to Duchess Sibylle. Since November of last year, which is since the new arrangement of our museum's amber collection, this necklace has been presented along with a photograph from Alfred Rohde's book and the caption: Fragment of a necklace – 10 beads, Gdańsk, 17th century (?). ”To my knowledge, there were many such necklaces at the time, so it will actually be difficult to definitively determine whether a given necklace or its fragments belonged precisely to Duchess Sibylle. However, our beads are certainly not identical to the necklace reproduced in 1937 by Alfred Rohde," explained Dr Anna Sobecka, curator of the amber collection at the Malbork Castle Museum.