Academic Art Museum

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Academic Art Museum, front
Aerial photograph (2016)

The Academic Art Museum is one of the oldest museums in Bonn . It houses the antique collection of the University of Bonn with over 2,700 casts of antique statues and reliefs and over 25,000 originals. It is located in a classicist building at the southern end of the courtyard garden, directly opposite the Electoral Palace .

building

Floor plan of the Academic Art Museum

The building, which today houses the Academic Art Museum, goes back to the building of the university's anatomical institute designed in 1824/25 by the Bonn university master builder Friedrich Waesemann, the father of the architect Hermann Friedrich Waesemann . It refers to the building of the anatomy ( anatomical theater ) of the Berlin veterinary school by Carl Gotthard Langhans , but was significantly revised by Karl Friedrich Schinkel . Two side buildings were attached to the demonstration hall, the rotunda , which was built during this period for demonstration and preparation purposes. The complex was used by the medical school until 1872.

The structural condition and the available space do not correspond to the importance of the collection. The exhibits are densely packed in the premises. A development association tries to supplement the funds available for renovation and expansion. With the help of the German Foundation for Monument Protection , renovation work on the floors could be carried out until 2006. The building of the former anatomy stands as a monument under monument protection . In 2012, further damage to the outer facade and especially to the roof structure was discovered. The end of the renovation work was planned for the end of 2014 and took place in spring 2015.

Some scenes from the Münster crime scene episode The Curse of the Mummy were filmed in front of and in the building.

history

The planning for the museum began as early as 1815 in preparation for the establishment of the Prussian Rhine University, later the University of Bonn, in 1818. Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker was appointed first director of the Antikensammlung and Professor of Classical Archeology in 1819. It was located in the main building of the university, the Electoral Palace and the university library, which was also housed there.

The first exhibits came from Paris in 1820 , including items probably requisitioned by French troops, the return of which Prussia was negotiating. According to the first catalog, the collection already comprised 189 numbers in 1827. Welcker made his first purchases of originals with the acquisition of coins and finds from the Rhineland from Canonicus Pick. Welcker expanded the collection considerably, also benefiting from the extensive trips to the Mediterranean region that he made in the 1840s. At the age of seventy, he resigned from his university positions in 1854.

Welcker's successors in the 19th century, Friedrich Ritschl , Otto Jahn , Reinhard Kekulé and Georg Loeschcke , succeeded in increasingly integrating the collection of antiquities into archaeological studies and the beginning critical assessment of the historical world. The collection activities were temporarily shared with the Museum of Rhenish Antiquities , which at that time still belonged to the university and is now the independent Rhenish State Museum . While the Rheinisches Museum collected the local finds, the art museum was able to concentrate on collecting the finds from the Mediterranean area. Georg Loeschcke in particular shifted the focus increasingly from the casts to the originals. Thanks to him, the collection developed into one of the outstanding university collections, not only for casts, but also for the original works. As is usually the case with university collections, the focus here was not on buying large and representative showpieces, but on getting exemplary pieces for different styles, with fragments and not just whole vessels being of importance.

Reinhard Kekulé had already made a contribution to expanding the collection by adding numerous purchases, including vases and terracottas . He also succeeded in securing the former anatomy for the antique collection and in 1884 to have a building for the cast collection expanded, the appearance of which followed the classicistic style of the older buildings. In 1908 another extension was added for the Archaeological Institute. Between the two world wars, the museum's funding was limited, significant purchases could hardly be made, and even maintaining the museum was often difficult.

After Richard Delbrueck retired as a professor in 1940 under political pressure , the buildings could only be used in the summer due to a defective heating system and considerable collection losses had occurred due to the war, Ernst Langlotz knew after 1945 and as his successor from 1969 Nikolaus Himmelmann with great personal commitment to rebuild the collection and to make the buildings usable again all year round. The Bonn collection is one of the largest plaster cast collections in Germany. While the cast collections of the Berlin, Munich or Würzburg universities were destroyed in the Second World War , the Bonn museum was spared this fate, which is why numerous historical plasters, some of them from the early days of the 19th century, have been preserved .

The heads of the Antikensammlung

With the exception of Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl, they were also professors of Classical Archeology at the University of Bonn. Since Reinhard Kekulé, the management of the museum has been linked to the ordinariate.

Curators

The designation of the curators changed over time; the list is not complete

collection

Minoan Larnax in marine style .
View of the cast collection (2016)

The cast collection of the Academic Art Museum has become one of the largest of its kind, and the original collection is the largest collection in North Rhine-Westphalia . A representative piece in the collection is a Minoan Larnax in marine style .

Hundreds of statues and reliefs from the plaster cast collection are currently on display in the permanent exhibition. There are also several thousand original works, primarily cabaret. The remaining pieces in the collection are stored in a magazine, but from time to time, for example, they are made accessible and presented to the public through special exhibitions. In addition, parts of the collections are made accessible through catalogs, the ceramics through the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum Germany .

Special exhibitions since 2000

  • 2000: Masterpieces of Greek ceramics from the Giuseppe Sinopoli collection
  • 2001: no more plaster. Casts as the last witnesses to ancient art
  • 2001: Treasures of the Celts from the Rheinisches Landesmuseum
  • 2001/2002: hand and foot. Werner Schaarmann and Ilse Wegmann
  • 2002: only half an ounce of gold. Roman jewelry from the Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn
  • 2002/2003: seal and imprint. Antique gems in Bonn
  • 2003: quiet familiar. Works by Heiner Meyers in dialogue with antiquity
  • 2003: role models
  • 2003: Theodor Mommsen's library . A selection
  • 2004: At home in new splendor. Restored works of art from the Academic Art Museum Bonn
  • 2004: Sleeps a song in all things. Goldsmith's work by Heide Simm
  • 2004: Sports show. Ancient athletes in action
  • 2005: Antiquity - Body - Forms by Donald von Frankenberg
  • 2006: Antiquity à la carte. Classicism masterpieces from Naples
  • 2006: L \ 'antica maniera - work in precious stones. Giovanni Calandrelli (1784-1853) and Gerhard Schmidt (born 1953)
  • 2006: Here with the gods. Contemporary art by Hildegard von Chappuis and Andreas Schumacher
  • 2006/2007: Caesars in Bonn
  • 2007: Myth and Disfigurement. Works by Peter Stauder
  • 2007/2008: Lots of people, clay and hollow. Terracottas of the Western Greeks
  • 2008: Colorful stones. Marble luxury in Roman architecture
  • 2008/2009: RASNA - The Etruscans
  • 2009/2010: Really antique or fake. Vases put to the test
  • 2010: Studying during the war. When the future has to wait
  • 2010: ΣΤΗΝ ΒΙΤΡΙΝΑ. Athenian mannequins, photographed by Ingrid Keller
  • 2010/2011: TonArt. Virtuosity of ancient pottery
  • 2011/2012: Dionysus and Apollon
  • 2012: The RAndreas restoration of the Athens Acropolis with photographs by Socratis Mavrommatis
  • 2013: Cleopatra VII - The familiar stranger
  • 2014: Copy the sun for me
  • 2014: Distant time. Evidence of early Greek art in the Academic Art Museum Bonn
  • 2014: Ancient sculpture 5.0: //. Documentation Media in Archeology - From Sketch to 3D Model
  • 2015: Adored
  • 2015/2016: “An instructive overview”. Georg Loeschcke and the Academic Art Museum
  • 2017: Dance in antiquity
  • 2017/18: games in antiquity
  • 2018: Divine Injustice? Punishments and tests of faith as subjects of ancient and early Christian art
  • 2019: Ikarus - sculpture exhibition by Raphael Ginbar
  • 2019: Draped! Antique robes - modern designs, with dresses by Rosemarie Bühler
  • 2019: Object Worlds as Cosmos - From Alexander von Humboldt to the Bonn Science Collections Network. Participation in an exhibition in the Koenig Research Museum
  • 2019: 200 years of the coin collection of the Academic Art Museum

Sunday tours

For more than 40 years now, the Academic Art Museum has held 45-minute guided tours on the subject areas offered by the museum every Sunday at 11:15 a.m. (except in September and on public holidays). These tours are completely organized by the Classical Archeology students and are also planned and carried out by them. The planning and implementation of guided tours for children, which take place 4 times a year for 8 to 12 year old children (free admission), is also completely in the hands of the students in order to give young visitors an impression of antiquity. The completely volunteer students also organize a "children's reading night" once a year, during which they - disguised as ancient Greeks - read stories from the world of Greek myths to the children.

literature

  • Wolfgang Ehrhardt : The Academic Art Museum of the University of Bonn under the direction of Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker and Otto Jahn . Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1982, ISBN 3-531-05082-6 . (Treatises of the Rheinisch-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften 68)
  • Wilfred Geominy , The Academic Art Museum of the University of Bonn under the direction of Reinhard Kekulé, Amsterdam 1989, ISBN 9060320778 .
  • Johanna Kinne: The academic art museum of the University of Bonn under the direction of Georg Loeschke from 1889 to 1912 . Petersberg, Imhof 2004, ISBN 3-937251-55-3 .
  • Andreas Denk , Ingeborg flag : Architectural guide Bonn . Dietrich Reimer Verlag, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-496-01150-5 , p. 19.

Web links

Commons : Academic Art Museum  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ List of monuments of the city of Bonn (as of March 15, 2019), p. 5, number A 177
  2. ↑ General-Anzeiger: Academic Art Museum am Hofgarten is being extensively renovated (accessed on May 27, 2014)
  3. ↑ http://www.ai.uni-bonn.de/akademisches-kunstmuseum/fuehrungen
  4. ↑ http://www.ai.uni-bonn.de/akademisches-kunstmuseum/junge-besucher/kinderfuehrungen

Coordinates: 50 ° 43 '54.4 "  N , 7 ° 6' 22.5"  E