Schönfeld's Technological Museum

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The Schönfeldsche Technological Museum was a collection of art and everyday objects that was located in Vienna for about 60 years and that goes back largely to the Prague Rudolphine Treasury and Art Chamber.

history

In the 1770s the garrison conditions of the Prague military had deteriorated further and further. It was therefore decided to release parts of Prague Castle for the establishment of a new artillery barracks. The important art collection of Emperor Rudolph II has been located in three underground cellars on the north side of the castle since the attack by the Prussian troops in 1756, which were now needed to store the gunpowder . Emperor Joseph II (1741–1790) therefore approved the dissolution of the collection. 573 paintings came to Vienna, everything else was sold at the auction on May 13 and 14, 1782.

Almost all of the collection came into the possession of the wealthy Prague court book printer Johann Ferdinand Ritter von Schönfeld , who, with a few exceptions, later brought the missing pieces into his possession and increased the collection by purchasing further art objects from dissolved monasteries. In the meantime, Schönfeld had moved to Vienna, where in 1799 he opened a technological museum in his apartment on Preßgasse (then land register number 488, later Sterngasse no. 6) on the second floor. Presumably shortly after 1812 he moved to Wollzeile (land register number 857, later house number 24).

After his death (1821), the technological museum came to his eldest son Ignaz Ritter von Schönfeld , who, however, did not have the funds of his father and therefore sold the collection to Josef Freiherr von Dietrich in 1822/23, who was one of the wealthiest residents in Vienna belonged. Dietrich initially showed great interest in the museum. For this purpose, he had an approximately 125 m² large hall and three additional rooms prepared in the house of his deceased brother Konrad in the Wieden district (land register number 103, later Heugasse No. 2 and 4, today's Technikerstraße) and commissioned Joseph Scheiger to create an exhibition catalog . Around the end of the 1820s, the company moved to the house in Schönlaterngasse, which Dietrich had acquired in 1810 (land register number 673, today's house number 8, some of the travel guides at the time, such as the Baedecker , incorrectly gave Obere Bäckergasse 673 as the address). Ultimately, around the beginning of the 1850s, Dietrich brought the collection to his house on Hauptstrasse in the Matzleinsdorf district (land register number 15–17, later Matzleinsdorfer Strasse 45–51), but only made available an attic space at the rear of his large property had already brought some exhibits, especially weapons and glass paintings, to his Feistritz Castle on the Wechsel .

After Dietrich's death (July 21, 1855), the guardianship of his underage grandson, Prince Joseph Sulkowsky, tried to find a buyer, and at the end of 1858 the remaining part of the collection was bought by the Frankfurt am Main antique dealers Abraham and Markus Löwenstein for 28,000 guilders acquired. They brought 1,291 pieces to London and had everything auctioned off by Christie, Manson and Woods between March 12 and 23, 1860 at The Vienna Museum, with a total proceeds of around 77,000 guilders.

Exhibits

Schönfeld had divided his exhibition into 51 sections (rubrics). It started, for example, with writing, printing, drawing and painting, copper and wood engravings, etching and casting, locksmithing and armouring as well as stone, wood and bone sculpting, leather work, weaving and embroidery up to industrial, Musical and mathematical instruments, watchmaking and automatons. There were 18,500 copper engravings, 3,000 wood engravings, 1,700 hand drawings, 4,500 gold, silver and copper coins, and 300 oil paintings. Jost Amman , Lucas Cranach , Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt are named as artists . The remarkable exhibits included a chess set made by Emperor Rudolph II himself from ivory and ebony, a burning mirror by the astronomer Johann Regiomontanus , who died in 1476, and the silver work of the coronation hall of Charles VI. or Rudolf II's cup of poison

Whereabouts

According to Schönfeld, his technological museum in 1817 consisted of 200,000 individual numbers. Scheiger, however, mentions only 50,000 in 1824. If Schönfeld's assertion was not just an exaggeration, Ignaz von Schönfeld was supposed to have retained a lot and otherwise sold it before the change of ownership to Dietrich. To what extent Dietrich furnished other of his numerous properties with art objects besides Feistritz Castle is not known. After his death, when the collection was in the care of the guardianship of his grandson, his housekeeping staff in Matzleinsdorf sold numerous tools, weapons, books and engravings from the collection to local second-handers. Ultimately, only a tiny part from the former Schönfeld Technology Museum was auctioned off in London . The fate of a few individual pieces could be better proven. Shortly before his death, Johann Ferdinand von Schönfeld gave away some paintings and the clay model The Sleeping Endymion to Anton Rollet, which are now in the Rollett Museum in Baden . In 1892, the Hamburg Museum of Art and Crafts purchased an astrolabe from the workshop of the Braunschweig goldsmith Tobias Volckamer, which once belonged to Tycho Brahe . Finally, a piece returned to Vienna. The relief Mariae Annunciation (around 1518) by Hans Daucher is now in the Vienna Art History Museum.

literature

  • Schönfeld's Technological Museum in Vienna . In: Patriotic papers for the Austrian imperial state . tape 3 , no. 5 , May 22, 1810, p. 45-49 ( onb.ac.at ).
  • Technological Museum of Mr. Ritter v. Schönfeld in Vienna (I) . In: Prague Newspaper . No. 170 , June 19, 1817, p. 663 ( onb.ac.at ).
  • Technological Museum of Mr. Ritter v. Schönfeld in Vienna (II) . In: Prague Newspaper . No. 171 , June 20, 1817, p. 667 ( onb.ac.at ).
  • Karl Baedecker (Ed.): Handbook for travelers through Germany and the Austrian Imperial State . Coblenz 1842, p. 37 ( google.de ).
  • Franz Heinrich Böckh (Ed.): Oddities of the capital and residence city of Vienna and its immediate surroundings. 1st part . Vienna 1823, p. 217-221 ( google.de ).
  • Roxane Cuvay: The Technological Museum Johann Ferdinand von Schönfeld . In: Viennese history sheets . tape 38 , 1983, p. 120-136 .
  • Eduard Leisching: A Vienna museum at the time of the Vienna Congress . In: Arts and Crafts . tape 24 , no. 5/6 , 1921, pp. 73-106 ( mak.at ).
  • Berthold Mormann: City stories from Austria. Emperor Rudolph's Second Chamber of Art in Prague and its vandalism . In: The Fatherland . tape 15 , no. 103 , April 15, 1874, p. 1 ( onb.ac.at ).
  • Joseph Scheiger: The technological museum of the knight of Schönfeld . Prague 1824 ( google.de ).
  • Johann Ferdinand von Schönfeld: Sketch of the catalog raisonné on the Technological Museum in Vienna . 1817 ( google.de ).
  • Josef Svátek: The Rudolfinische Kunstkammer in Prague . In: Culturhistorische Bilder from Bohemia . Vienna 1879, p. 225-272 ( nkp.cz ).
  • Paul Tausig: An Old Baden Provat Theater . In: Baden newspaper . October 26, 1912.
  • Heinrich Zimmermann: The inventory of the Prague treasury and art chamber from December 6, 1621: according to files of the k. and k. Reich Finance Archives in Vienna . In: Yearbook of the art history collections of the highest imperial family . tape 25 , 1905, pp. XIII – LXXV ( uni-heidelberg.de ).

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Joseph Freiherr von Dietrich'sche weapons collection from Feistritz Castle am Wechsel . 342nd Art Action, Vienna, Dorotheum, October 29 and 30, 1923. Vienna 1923 ( uni-heidelberg.de ).
  2. ↑ Schönfeld, p. 3
  3. ↑ Scheiger, p. 22
  4. ↑ Leisching, p. 92
  5. ↑ Leisching, p. 102
  6. ↑ Leisching, p. 80
  7. ↑ Leisching, p. 91
  8. ^ Alfred Rohde: An astrological instrument by Tycho de Brahe and Tobias Volckamer for Rudolf II in the Museum of Art and Industry . In: Supplement to the Hamburger Nachrichten . July 2, 1925, p. 14 ( theeuropeanlibrary.org ).

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