This summer, the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne is showing 90 particularly impressive drawings from its Jesuit collection for the first time in a special show entitled "Wir Glauben Kunst" (We Believe Art). The collection has been on permanent loan to the museum since the 1880s. Together with the drawings collection of Ferdinand Franz Wallraf, the collection of some 500 works forms the basis for the collection of more than 65,000 prints to this day. The exhibition explores the special character of the Jesuit collection: Is it a purely educational collection? According to which criteria did the Order collect? Did questions of quality and connoisseurship play the decisive role, or were content aspects more decisive? And finally: Where did the Jesuits buy their drawings? In addition, the concept of the Jesuits as pictorial artists is also discussed, since the Order had developed its own pictorial theology.

When Pope Clemens XIV abolished the Jesuit Order on 21 July 1773, the Old University of Cologne and the so-called Artist Faculties were also dissolved, to which the Tricoronatum grammar school with its important teaching collection, which had been headed by members of the Jesuit Order since 1556, belonged. In the course of the French occupation all art objects were confiscated and brought to Paris. In the 1880s, the Kölner Gymnasial- und Stiftungsfonds, the then legal successor of the Order, succeeded in bringing the collection back to the Rhine in order to give it on permanent loan to the museum. In contrast to the drawings that remained in Paris, the Cologne drawings have their historical origins written, as it were, in their faces. At the upper right edge of the picture, all drawings bear the note Col. (Cologne) in black printing ink. After their arrival in Paris, this note was printed on the visible side facing the viewer, a seal that the drawings were to bear once and for all on their physical carrier, the paper. But it was only because of this seal that all the stamped drawings returned to Cologne after the collapse of the French Republic.