Museum on Augustinergasse
The museum on Augustinergasse is located on Augustinergasse in Basel . Built according to a design by Melchior Berris and opened in 1849, it is considered the first real museum building in Basel . Extensions and conversions have expanded it and changed it a lot, especially inside. The Universal Museum initially housed the entire public collection, which was, however, divided up through successive museum foundations and largely housed elsewhere. The Natural History Museum Basel is now housed in the “Berri-Bau”, as it is also called after its architect .
construction
The city and the University of Basel had owned the formerly private Amerbach cabinet since 1661 , which they housed in the Haus zur Mücke in 1671 . The number of objects grew rapidly, especially after the second half of the 18th century, in the wake of the Enlightenment educational efforts, and the building and its infrastructure were no longer adequate for the increased public traffic and the modern culture of knowledge. The Natural History Museum , established in 1821, moved into its own premises in the Falkensteinerhof . From 1836, plans began for a new building to replace the Augustinian monastery used by the university, with a multi-purpose building first being considered. The fact that a museum building on Augustinergasse gradually moved into the center of considerations was due to the difficult situation that the university had in large circles of the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie. There it was considered a backward-looking institution. The museum, on the other hand, was thought to be an engine of practical popular education and was willing to support its construction with private contributions as part of the then rampant renewal process of the city. In 1841 a "museum association" was founded to collect funds for the new building.
The building, simply called "Museum", was built from 1844 and opened in 1849. It consisted of lecture, event, library and museum rooms, with the latter making up the main part. The museum on Augustinergasse is Melchior Berris' main work . The late Classicist monumental building with decorative painting and frescoes by Arnold Böcklin is a comparatively early bourgeois museum and the first large Basel museum. The reception of Karl Friedrich Schinkel and his Berlin building academy is clearly recognizable . The figure frieze on the main facade designed by Johann Jakob Oechslin , with its allegorical depictions, illustrates the museum's role as a “temple of science and the arts” supported by the progressive bourgeoisie. For cost reasons, a considerable part of the outer walls of the monastery church was taken over for one of the two museum wings, which were not used for representation.
The main facade cannot be viewed from a distance due to the museum's location on the narrow Augustinergasse. This deficiency was criticized as early as 1849. However, there is no evidence that the construction was also planned to demolish the opposite houses so that, viewed from the right bank of the Rhine ( Kleinbasel ), the aesthetic effect and ideal message of the architecture can be fully realized. The then building inspector Heinrich Reese made this proposal in 1881, and it was never followed up in concrete terms.
As a result of several additions and conversions as a result of changes in use, the interiors have fundamentally changed their original appearance except for the entrance area, the staircase and the auditorium since the 1890s. The amphitheatrical lecture hall on the ground floor gave way to the extension from 1913 to 1915; after 1928 the original, richly furnished skylight halls were replaced; Between 1968 and 1971, intermediate floors were added due to the need for space. As the museum operations (exhibition, storage, administration) extended to other neighboring buildings, a museum complex was created from the individual original building on Augustinergasse.
Auditorium
A large, richly furnished room was created on the first floor. It was intended for academic celebrations and lectures. On the walls is the Professorengalerie, a collection of portraits of the same format of professors from the University of Basel founded in 1686/87 and expanded until 1904 . 100 paintings are hung in the auditorium, 18 in the anteroom, three in the library and four in the meeting room. In 1857 and 1860, marble busts commissioned by Ferdinand Schlöth by Johann Ludwig Burckhardt , called Scheik Ibrahim, and by Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette were set up in the auditorium . 1876–1879 the same sculptor created ten more busts of professors, which were placed in the anteroom of the auditorium and in the stairwell leading to the auditorium, but were transferred to the Basel sculpture hall in 2008 .
use
The space and usage program from 1849 combined university facilities with a library, natural history and art collections. Most of the subsidiary institutions, i.e. institutions that support teaching and research on the object, were also considered collections. This also included the apparatus of the chemical and physical institution or the instruments of the anatomical institution. The unity of the public collections that was achieved at the time (the Natural History Museum had also moved in from the Falkensteinerhof) ended a few years later after it was merged in the Museum on Augustinergasse. In parallel to the specialization of the educational and research disciplines, institutional collections, which were separated according to scientific categories, developed from the diverse inventory of objects in Basel.
In 1856, the "medieval collection", based on the model of the Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg, was moved to ancillary rooms and annex buildings (Bischofshof, Niklauskapelle) of the Basel Minster , and in 1887 the casts of ancient sculptures came to the Kunsthalle . In the meantime, the chemical and physical institutes had also moved to the new building for the natural sciences, known as the Bernoullianum , in 1874 , after which their holdings lost their collection character in favor of laboratory facilities. In 1892 the "antiquarian collection" (the ancient cabaret) excluding ethnological objects and the medieval collection in the cathedral with the historical weapons of the Basel armory were combined to form the Basel Historical Museum and from 1894 exhibited in the converted Barfüsserkirche . In 1896 the entire library was moved to the new university library . The “ethnographic collection”, since 1905 renamed “Sammlung für Völkerkunde”, moved into additional rooms in the 1913–1915 extension of the museum on Augustinergasse and became the “Museum für Völkerkunde”. Renamed in 1996 to the Basel Museum of Cultures , it moved its entrance from Augustinergasse to Münsterplatz in 2007 and has largely dismantled the previously close spatial ties with the “Berri-Bau”. In 1936, after around three decades of planning, the art collection moved to the Kunstmuseum Basel . However, it had branches in the Augustinerhof on Augustinergasse (Kupferstichkabinett) and in the Bachofenhaus on Münsterplatz (Bachofen collection with other holdings) as early as 1922, and since 1928 its main part has found a temporary home in the Kunsthalle. Only the Natural History Museum Basel , which presents most areas of the natural sciences , has retained both its location from 1849 and its traditional name.
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ INSA. Inventory of newer Swiss architecture 1850–1920: Basel , Basel 1986, p. 126.
- ↑ Stefan Hess : Between Winckelmann and Winkelried. The Basel sculptor Ferdinand Schlöth (1818–1891). Berlin 2010, pp. 170–177.
- ↑ Stefan Hess: Between Winckelmann and Winkelried. The Basel sculptor Ferdinand Schlöth (1818–1891). Berlin 2010, pp. 73f., 176-181.
literature
- Georg Hermann, Dorothee Huber: The building of the old museum in Basel (1844-1849) , Basler Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Altertumskunde, Vol. 78, 1978, pp. 5-31
- Dorothea Huber: Architecture Guide Basel. The building history of the city and its surroundings. Architekturmuseum Basel, Basel 1993, ISBN 3-905065-22-3 , pp. 112–114.
- Nikolaus Meier: Identity and Difference. For the 150th anniversary of the opening of the museum on Augustinergasse in Basel. In: Basler Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Altertumskunde 100 (2000), pp. 121–192 ( digitized version )
- Anne Nagel, Martin Möhle, Brigitte Meles: The art monuments of the canton of Basel-Stadt , Vol. VII The old town of Grossbasel I - secular buildings . Bern 2006, pp. 282–293.
