Coin cabinet and antique collection of the city of Winterthur
The Münzkabinett and Antikensammlung der Stadt Winterthur is a coin cabinet and an antique collection owned by the City of Winterthur . The numismatic collection comprises over 55,000 pieces, plus banknotes, plaster casts and a library. There is also a collection of around 1,600 objects. The Münzkabinett, which has been an independent museum since 1982, organizes temporary exhibitions in its premises in the Villa Bühler and offers numerous educational activities.
history
The history of the Münzkabinett in Winterthur is much older than that of the museum itself. In the year the Winterthur Citizens Library was founded in 1660, the donations included 24 coins and the donor book regularly recorded donations of coins and medals in subsequent years. In 1755 the collection already comprised 4,805 coins, 50 of which were gold and 1,771 silver coins. In a revision in 1846, however, only 2,867 pieces were found, which shows that the collection was not that well looked after at the time.
In 1861, the Münzkabinett became an independent institution within the city library and Friedrich Imhoof-Blumer became the collection's first honorary curator. In 1866 Imhoof-Blumer bought what was then the largest collection of coins in Switzerland from Landammann Carl Friedrich Emil Lohner in Thun and bequeathed them together with his own collection to his hometown in 1871, which thus owned the most important numismatic collection in Switzerland. The donation comprised over 10,578 coins, tripling the number of coins in the Münzkabinett. Imhoof-Blumer then continued to collect mainly Greek coins privately and in 1900 he sold his collection to the Münzkabinett Berlin . He donated part of the proceeds, 100,000 marks, for a job at the Greek Mint Company , which he published together with Theodor Mommsen . He then built up another collection until his death in 1920, which he bequeathed to Oskar Bernhard , the husband of his daughter Elisabetha. After Bernard's death in 1952, this collection was also transferred to the Münzkabinett. Until his death, the collection grew to 21,000 pieces under his leadership. He also left the Münzkabinett a comprehensive collection of 80,000 plaster casts of ancient coins.
After Imhoof-Blumer's death, Adolf Engeli took over the management of the Münzkabinett until 1939, he was also the author of a comprehensive biography of Imhoof-Blumer's. During his time, the coin find on the Haldengut area in 1930, which comprised 2,750 coins. From 1939 to 1947 Heinz Haffter took over the management of the collection. The classical scholar was like its predecessor teacher at the district school Winterthur. During his time in 1941, Carl Hüni , the director of SLM , donated a total of 2,800 coins and medals, the largest donation since Imhoof-Blumer in 1871. After Haffter returned to the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in Munich in 1946 - he was Went to Switzerland when the war broke out in 1939 - and became its director in 1947, Hansjörg Bloesch took over the position of curator in Winterthur after a year of vacancy . He was the first non-volunteer manager of the collection and initially ran the collection in a paid part-time position. He was also a professor at the University of Zurich. In 1949 he determined a stock of 27,414 items that belonged to the collection.
After Bloesch left, the next important step for the Münzkabinett followed in 1982: it moved from the library building to the nearby Villa Bühler and thus became an independent museum. The new conservator was Dr. Hans-Markus von Kaenel , who headed the collection until 1992 with a three-year interruption (1985–1988, interim director at that time was the archaeologist Dr. Christian Zindel ). The medievalist Benedikt Zäch , lic.phil., Has been director of the museum since 1993 . In 1994 the Münzkabinett came under strong austerity pressure as a result of a political initiative from the Winterthur parliament (large municipal council). In spring 1995 the move (a parliamentary motion) was rejected by parliament with broad Swiss and international support. In the same year the association “Friends of the Münzkabinett Winterthur” was founded, which currently has around 140 members.
Today the Münzkabinett employs five other part-time employees for administration, library, museum education and scientific assistance as well as various freelance workers in addition to the manager. Since 1986 the Münzkabinett has also housed a processing center for coin finds. The most important client is the canton of Zurich, where a long-term service contract exists. Around 6,400 found coins from the canton of Zurich and other coin finds from the cantons of St. Gallen, Baselland and Lucerne as well as from the Principality of Liechtenstein have been processed and published as part of evaluation projects.
building
The coin cabinet is located in the Villa Bühler-Egg , a villa built between 1867 and 1869 by the industrialist Eduard Bühler-Egg , who owned a cotton mill in Kollbrunn and a worsted yarn mill in Bürglen . The villa was built in the French neo-baroque style according to plans by the Bernese-Alsatian architect Louis-Frédéric de Rutté . The associated garden was designed by the landscape architect Conrad Löwe in 1870 . The villa is a cantonal listed building, and the collections of the Münzkabinett are classified in the federal inventory of mobile cultural assets in Switzerland as holdings of national importance. In addition to the coin cabinet, the governor's office for the Winterthur district and the Winterthur district council are located in the building.
Collections
The numismatic collection consists of approx. 48,000 pieces, with deposits (most of them found coins from the canton of Zurich since 1986) 57,000 objects. The collection has two main focuses, on the one hand Greek and Roman coins (around 13,500 pieces) and on the other hand Swiss coins (over 12,000 pieces). The collection also includes around 12,000 banknotes and, above all, emergency notes. The Münzkabinett has the most important collection of Greek coins in Switzerland and, depending on the area, the second or third best collection of Swiss coins. Furthermore, the Münzkabinett now has a collection of 135,000 plaster casts, mainly of Greek and Roman provincial coins, to which there is an additional inventory of around 30,000 sealing wax impressions of ancient coins (from important auctions in the first half of the 20th century). The Münzkabinett Winterthur is one of the internationally important reference collections for ancient numismatics.
The library of the Münzkabinett, which is listed as an independent library in the WebOPAC of the Winterthur libraries , comprises around 20,000 books, magazines and offprints. The collection of the Münzkabinett is still shaped today by the work of Imhoof-Blumer, the focus of the collection on Greek and Provincial Roman coins as well as the collection of plaster casts and the basic library go back to him, although the collections have been since the death of Imhoof-Blumer in 1920 more than tripled and the library has quadrupled since then.
The second part of the collection is an antique collection. On the one hand, it contains around 1,000 archaeological finds from the Winterthur region and other sites from the Neolithic to the Roman period; on the other hand, around 600 vases, bronzes and ceramics, terracottas and glass objects from ancient Mediterranean cultures.
Exhibitions and mediation
Since 1982 the Münzkabinett has made the collection accessible to a broad public with regular temporary exhibitions; there is no permanent exhibition. In over sixty larger and smaller exhibitions, cross-sectional topics (e.g. "Women in the history of coins", "222 x gold: From Croesus to Goldvreneli", "Animals in the coin image", "Money makes history"), regions and countries ( e.g. "Chinese money from three millennia", "Money from Tibet", "Bohemia: Money and History in the Heart of Europe"), topics (e.g. "The Swiss Franc", "Gold and Silver: New Money in the Late Middle Ages") "," Outside Europe: Money and History 1600–2000 ") or epochs (eg" Byzantine coins "," Greeks - Persians - Romans: Ancient coins from Asia Minor "," 1648 - 1798 - 1848: turning marks in Swiss coin history ") as well as archaeological topics and treated in the sense of a cultural history of money. Various exhibition projects were created in cooperation with other museums, such as the Musée d'art et d'histoire in Neuchâtel or the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna .
In addition to the exhibitions, the Münzkabinett offers a wide range of educational opportunities, which are aimed at children and young people of all ages with workshops and are offered as part of the Winterthur Museum Education. Public tours, museum concerts and other events are aimed at adults and children. Since 2011 there has also been a small children's museum, the "Kinderkubus".
Web links
Coordinates: 47 ° 30 '10.8 " N , 8 ° 43' 51.7" E ; CH1903: six hundred ninety-seven thousand three hundred and sixty-nine / 262162