Richard Schöne

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Richard Schöne (self-portrait 1863)
Later photography

Richard Schöne (born February 5, 1840 in Dresden , † March 5, 1922 in Berlin-Grunewald ) was a German classical archaeologist and director of the Royal Museums in Berlin (1880-1905).

Life

Richard Schöne began studying classical philology and philosophy at the University of Leipzig in 1858 , where he received his doctorate from Christian Hermann Weisse in 1861 with his dissertation On Plato's Protagoras: A Contribution to Solving the Platonic Question . He then began training as a painter in Friedrich Preller's studio in Weimar, but soon turned back to a scientific career and went on a study trip to Italy in 1864, where he met Otto Benndorf and Reinhard Kekulé von Stradonitz in Rome . This encounter brought him to his lifelong preoccupation with ancient art, which Schöne began with numerous essays even then. In the year of his return to Germany (1868) he completed his habilitation in Berlin with the text Quaestionum Pompeianarum specimen for archeology and shortly afterwards received a call to the University of Halle as an associate professor, which he followed in 1869. Three years later he left the university to work in Berlin as a consultant for art affairs in the Prussian Ministry of Culture. As early as 1878, he represented the director of the Royal Museums , Guido Graf von Usedom , who was on leave and took office in 1880.

During the quarter century in which Schöne was director, the Berlin museums experienced a remarkable boom. He took care of the systematic increase and updating of the older holdings through individual purchases, acquisitions of large collections and excavations. He also initiated complex new construction projects for the new departments of the museums. He not only benefited from the economic upswing of the founding years , but also from the support of the Prussian Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm . An important innovation of Schöne was the reorganization of the museums, which he initiated with his statute of 1878. He granted the directors greater independence compared to the general director and their own financial resources. His services were not only of a guiding nature, but above all of a mediating nature. This extensive departmental autonomy, guaranteed in the tradition of liberal-bourgeois cultural policy, laid the foundation for the rise of Berlin's museums to global importance. Adolf Bastian built the Berlin Museum of Ethnology into an encyclopedic institute that is unique in the world , not least thanks to the means for expeditions and acquisitions that were repeatedly reorganized through the intervention of Richard Schöne . Schöne also convinced Bismarck to transfer Schliemann's Trojan antiquities, which had been given to the “German people”, into the holdings of the Museum of Ethnology . Schöne enriched the Berlin antique collection with numerous finds from the Pergamon follow-up excavations in Magnesia am Mäander , Priene and Milet and finally founded the Vorderasiatisches Museum in 1899, especially for the finds from the excavations of the German Orient Society .

Schöne's influence was also evident outside Berlin: He made decisive progress in provincial Roman archeology by initiating the establishment of the provincial museums in Bonn (1876) and Trier (1877) and advocating the establishment of the Roman-Germanic Commission at the German Archaeological Institute (1902 ). Already in these years he received a lot of recognition, including the honorary membership of the Prussian Academy of Sciences (1900), the appointment to the Real Secret Council and the award of the Crown Order, 1st class.

With Friedrich Althoff's entry into the Ministry of Culture, Schöne encountered increasing resistance in his efforts. After numerous arguments about modern Impressionist painting , Kaiser Wilhelm II gradually withdrew his trust. Finally, in 1905 Schöne submitted his departure. Until the end of his life he lived in seclusion in his villa in Grunewald designed by Alfred Messel , where he devoted himself particularly to his philological research on Aeneas Tacticus . He died on March 5, 1922 and is buried in the Grunewald cemetery. His estate is in the central archive of the State Museums in Berlin . In the following decades the memory of beautiful achievement was pushed more and more into the background, not least because of the strongly tendentious memoirs of his successor Wilhelm von Bode .

The institutionally independent Richard-Schöne-Gesellschaft für Museumsgeschichte e. V. bears its name in memory of the first civic, scientifically trained general director of today's Berlin State Museums.

family

Schöne married Cäcilie Härtel (* May 10, 1842 in Leipzig, † April 26, 1870 in Halle / Saale), a daughter of the music publisher Hermann Härtel (1803-1875) , on May 6, 1869 in the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig . The philologist Hermann Schöne came from this marriage . After her death, he married her sister, the divorced Helene Wigand, née Helene Wigand, on April 15, 1873, also in the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig. Härtel (born June 1, 1844 in Leipzig, † June 26, 1928 in Berlin). She was previously married to the bookseller Albrecht Wigand, a son of the bookseller Georg Wigand . The second marriage came from District Administrator Friedrich Schöne .

Schöne brother was the philologist and literary historian Alfred Schöne . The royal Dutch officer Wolf Curt von Schierbrand was his uncle.

literature

Web links

Wikisource: Richard Schöne  - Sources and full texts
personal data
SURNAME Nice, Richard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Beautiful, Richard Curt Theophilus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German classical archaeologist and museum director
DATE OF BIRTH February 5, 1840
PLACE OF BIRTH Dresden
DATE OF DEATH March 5, 1922
Place of death Berlin-Grunewald