Archive

Programme 2024

17 December

presentations by Janet Dickinson, OUDCE, UK; Paweł Litwinienko, National Maritime Museum in Gdańsk, Poland; Martijn Manders, University of Leiden, Netherlands

workshop with three ten-minute presentations followed by q&a plus discussion
The Palmwood Shipwreck
In 2014, over a thousand objects were recovered from the Palmwood shipwreck (BZN17) off the north Dutch coast in 2014, many in a remarkable state of preservation. Amongst these were a number of leather book covers. Drawing on book binding scholarship, these objects can give an understanding to these books and their owners as well as trade and travel in the mid seventeenth century.
Janet Dickinson MA DPhil is Departmental Lecturer in History at OUDCE, where she teaches across a range of programmes. Her main research interests focus on the Tudor nobility and the Tudor court as well as the global history of the court in the early modern period, on which she has published widely, including a monograph, Court Politics and the Earl of Essex (2011). She was also involved in researching the extraordinary objects retrieved from a 17th century shipwreck off the Dutch island of Texel, known as the ‘Palmwood Wreck’: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0268117X.2022.2123847?src=
Janet is a co-convenor of the Tudor and Stuart Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research in London and a member of the Executive Committee of the Society for Court Studies. She recently served on the steering committee of the Lord Burghley 500 Foundation, celebrating the 500th anniversary of William Cecil, Lord Burghley’s birth and continues to be involved in establishing an educational legacy programme and encouraging awareness of and interest in the broad subject of Mildred and William Cecil and their world. She tweets as @Tudornobility and can also be found @janetdickinson.bsky.social

When the Sun set at Noon – Artefacts from the “Solen”, the 1627 Swedish shipwreck from the Gulf of Gdańsk
The year 1969 brought an unexpected discovery during the works on a new Gdańsk harbour fairway. Just a few miles from the shore a shipwreck was found, with bronze cannons lying on ballast stones and wooden construction. The wreck was excavated by the divers and underwater archaeologists from the National Maritime Museum in Gdańsk during the years 1970-1981. It was soon revealed that the wreck was no other than the “Solen”, the Swedish galleon sunk during the battle of Oliwa in 1627. The excavations yielded an impressive collection of findings – over 6,000 artefacts related to the every-day life of seventeenth-century sailors and soldiers aboard a warship on active duty, as well as to the very art of sailing. The conserved artefacts form now a vital part of the exhibition of the NMM main building and are objects of continuous research. The presentation will focus on a small section of the collection, interesting to the eyes of both nautical experts and art historians.
Paweł Litwinienko is an underwater archaeologist working at the National Maritime Museum in Gdańsk. His research interests are mainly the history of shipbuilding, sailing and the maritime culture. He is both an active commercial diver involved in underwater research conducted by the Museum and a PhD student exploring the topic of Early Medieval sailing and shipbuilding along the Gulf of Gdańsk viewed through archaeological sources.

Stone Blocks, Pillar Dollars and Coconuts: The Immense Variety of Objects Collected from the VOC Ship Rooswijk as Anchor Points of Different Narratives
This presentation will be about the different narratives we can tell about the Rooswijk ship that sank in 1740 in front of the British Coast, based on the objects that were found on the wreck. By examining the context we can trace the stories of individual objects that together make up a complex history of a ship and its crew.
Martijn Manders works at the cross-roads of maritime and underwater archaeology and maritime and underwater cultural heritage management. Policies, international conventions, assessing the significance but also shared heritage, cognitive landscapes and cultural diplomacy in maritime heritage management are amongst the subjects that he researches.

26 November

Presentation by Petra Trnkova, PhD, Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague

museum presentation of 20 minutes followed by q & a and discussion
The collection of (historical) photographs of the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences
The photographic collection was established at the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences (IAH CAS) in Prague in 2008. It was created by separating photographs from more than forty archival fonds held by the IAH. In a way, photographs then followed graphics and drawings, which had received their autonomy and recognition there much earlier. The talk will not only shed light on the specific circumstances of the collection’s foundation, which happened just sixteen years ago, but also on what followed. It will outline both specific steps that have been taken and the theoretical questions that have gradually arisen. Special attention will also be paid to the prehistory of the collection, particularly in the period before the photographs were transferred to the IAH, and to the consequences that the establishment of the collection – or rather the revival of the material in question – brought.
Petra Trnkova, PhD, is a photo historian and a research fellow at the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. In addition to the history of 19th- and early 20th-century photography, she is interested in the history and historiography of photomechanical printing and other techniques of mechanical reproduction of artefacts in the 19th century. In 2023, she was a Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, where she investigated the history of mechanical reproduction of painting. Her research has been supported by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 program (MSCA IF), the Czech Science Foundation, the Czech Academy of Sciences (Strategy AV21 program), and the Czech Ministry of Culture.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Petra-Trnkova | ptrnkova@gmail.com

29 October

Rachel King, Curator of Renaissance Europe and the Waddesdon Bequest at the British Museum, London.

lecture of 40 minutes followed by discussion
Purchases from Prague: Buying Rudolph II and Bohemia in Nineteenth- Century England
Monday March 12, 1860, marked the beginning of a notable sale in London. That afternoon ‘the rooms of the fashionable auctioneers, Messrs. Christie, Manson, and Woods [were] crowded with amateurs of wealth and taste’. People were flocking to the dispersal of, in one newspaper’s words, that ‘celebrated collection, known under the designation of the “Vienna Museum”. The catalogue, a tome of over 130 pages, has been of interest for its revolutionary employment of salt-print photographs. When lot 1291 was finally reached, ten days later, a sum equivalent to around three quarters of a million pounds had been raised. The sale lifted eyebrows across England.
Correspondents in the regions were aghast at the prices achieved for the types of objects local authorities had been ignorantly jettisoning as ‘old silver’. A surviving annotated copy in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France records which lots were sold, remained unsold, who bought, and the hammer prices paid. My paper will study the sale, its history, and its legacy as one route to understanding British engagement with the history and material culture of Rudolph II and East Central Europe in the mid-nineteenth century.
Rachel King, PhD is Curator of Renaissance Europe and the Waddesdon Bequest at the British Museum, London. She has previously held curatorial positions at The Burrell Collection, National Museums Scotland, and the Bavarian State Museums and Galleries. Rachel’s work is being undertaken as part of a British Museum publication celebrating the 2022 exhibition ‘Printmaking in Prague: Art from the Court of Rudolf II’ curated by Dr Olenka Horbatsch.

25 June

lecture by Markéta Ježková, Researcher at the Department of Early Modern Art, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague

lecture of 40 minutes followed by q & a
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and the Prague Castle Art Collection 1920-1952
From the period after an independent Czechoslovakia was established up to 1952, a collection of art was purchased for Prague Castle, which is still housed in its original location. More than 500 paintings were purchased from the so-called Masaryk National Fund, collected for the 70th and 80th birthdays of the first Czechoslovak president, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. The funds raised were to be used by the President for social and cultural projects for which there was no support from other resources.
The collection was part of the state representation, but above all it was intended to represent the presidency. From the beginning it was, therefore, based on the taste and requirements of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, which he tried to put into practice as part of his political endeavours. Due to the respect for his person, these ideas were largely followed and developed further under his successor Edvard Beneš.
Markéta Ježková studied French, Aesthetics and Art History. In 2019, she joined the Institute of Art History at the Czech Academy of Sciences, as a post-doc researcher, focusing on art collecting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly in the circles associated with Rudolf II's court, and the digital humanities. In 2018, she collaborated on the comprehensive catalogue and first exhibition of Masaryk's collection.

28 May

Presentation of the Gallery of Matica Srpska, Novi Sad, Serbia by Tijana Palkovljevic Bugarski and Jelena Ognjanovic

20 minute presentation followed by q&a and discussion
The Gallery of Matica Srpska, an institution of national importance, was founded in 1847 in Budapest under the auspices of Matica Srpska, the oldest cultural, literary and scientific society among the Serbs. It was located in Budapest until the Matica Srpska moved to Novi
Sad in 1864. From the very beginning, first as the Museum of Matica Srpska and then, from 1947, as an independent institution, the Gallery has been engaged in collecting, preserving, studying, exhibiting and interpreting works of art of Serbian cultural heritage.
Opened to the public in 1958 in a building on Gallery Square in Novi Sad, with its permanent exhibition and ongoing exhibitions, Matica Srpska Gallery aims to be a place of education about the development of artistic ideas, teaching the public about artists, works of art, as well as about the Gallery's benefactors.
With a collection of over 11,000 works of art, the Gallery is one of the richest art museums in the country. The collections of paintings, graphics, drawings and sculpture of the eighteenth , nineteenth and early twentieth (ca. 1950) centuries, illustrate the origin and development of Serbian art of recent eras and indicate the position and place of national culture in the European context.
In addition to basic museological, scientific and research work, the Gallery of Matica Srpska presents highly developed activities in the fields of exhibition and publication, conservation and restoration, educational programmes and creative workshops for children and teenagers. The Gallery is constantly engaged in introducing new contents and forms of activities, always with the intention of improving and extending the dissemination of culture and art towards a wider audience and the preservation of the national cultural heritage.
Tijana Palkovljević Bugarski, PhD, is the director of the Gallery of Matica Srpska. After graduating from the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade in 1999 in art history she received her PhD from the Department of Museology in 2016 with a dissertation on The Gallery of Matica Srpska. An Image of a Cultural Identity through the Presentation of Artworks.
Tijana has been director of the Gallery of Matica Srpska since 2010, transforming the institution into an active and modern museum. Her research interests include national art and visual culture of the twentieth century, as well as the protection and promotion of cultural heritage and the development of innovative museological approaches. She is currently engaged in creating the Gallery’s programme and publishing activities, developing international cooperation networks, and positioning the Gallery of Matica Srpska at a national and international level.
Tijana is a member of the Department of Fine Arts of the Matica Srpska and its Board of Directors, a member of the Executive Board of the National Committee of ICOM (International Committee of Museums), actively participates in the work of NEMO (Network of European Museum Organization), ICTOP (International Committee for the Training of Personnel) and the Forum of Slavic Cultures. Ever since 2012, she has been the national coordinator of the European Museum Academy, as well as the
President of the Board of Directors of the Foundation “Novi Sad 2021 – European Capital of Culture”, and a member of the Council of the Prime Minister of the Republic of Serbia for creative industries, since 2018. She is a guest lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad, at the Department of Comparative Literature. She is the winner of numerous awards and recognitions and the holder of the Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of France, 2019, as well as the Decoration of Honour in Gold for Services to the Republic of Austria, 2023.
Jelena Ognjanović, MSc, senior curator and Programme Director of the Gallery of Matica Srpska, graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade in art history and earned her master’s degree at the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad, in the Department of Pedagogy.
Since 2013, she has been working at the Gallery of Matica Srpska as a museum educator and PR manager and, from 2022, as the programme director, dealing with the preparation and realization of exhibitions, the coordination of international projects and public relations, as well as  activities related to educational programmes for children and young adults. In her role as museum educator, she has created numerous educational programmes and workshops for children and young adults and coordinated several European projects. She curated several exhibitions at the Gallery of Matica Srpska, for which she also prepared accompanying publications. Jelena is engaged in the study of museology and museum education. She actively participates in the work of specialist meetings, conferences, and
workshops nationally and abroad, primarily in the field of museum education and museology. She is also a member of the National Committee of ICOM, Serbia.

30 April

Jelena Todorovic (University of Arts, Belgrade)

lecture of 40 minutes followed by discussion
Prince Paul and the Prince of Dealers
On the Role of Prince Paul Karadjordjevic as collector and Joseph Duveen as a major art dealer in the creation of the State Art Collection of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.
The history of collecting in Europe and even more in the America of the 1920s and 1930s would be impossible to imagine without the figure of Joseph Duveen. Very little is known, however, about the decisive role he played in the creation of the State Art Collection in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1929-1938) and the influence he had on the politics of collecting of this newly-founded country on the Balkans. This presentation aims to shed more light not only on the role of Joseph Duveen in the foundation of the State Art Collection, but also on the rarely discussed collaboration and friendship between Prince Paul of Yugoslavia and Joseph Duveen. This most successful “joint venture” between a Royal Prince and a Prince of Dealers profoundly shaped the State Art Collection (SAC). It also made possible the foundation of the Museum of Modern Art in Belgrade and of Prince Paul’s personal collection. The SAC, comprising European and Yugoslav works of art, had a rich and a curious history which is an integral, albeit neglected, part of the European cultural history of the twentieth century. It was symbolically founded in 1929 on connection with the proclamation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and works of art were added to it until the late 1970s, prior to the death of President Tito. Although by its contents and its historical importance the SAC forms a notable part of the European and Yugoslav cultural heritage, this collection was never fully researched and was virtually unknown outside, and even within the borders of the former Yugoslavia. It was for the first time in 2014 that a complete Catalogue of the fine arts collection of the SAC in Belgrade was printed and its works of art were finally made available to the wider local and European audience.
Jelena Todorovic studied Art History (1993-1998) at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade before gaining her MA and PhD at University College London (UCL – 1998-2004), where she worked as a teaching assistant and part-time lecturer. In 2005, she transferred to the University of the Arts in Belgrade where she presently teaches in the Faculty of Fine Arts as Full Professor.
Although an art historian by training, her interests have always been more directed towards early-modern cultural history, including the fields of festival culture, of art and propaganda, concepts of time and transience, and the understanding of liminal spaces in the visual arts. She teaches at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, with the aim of introducing the approach of cultural history and interdisciplinary, which are so important for future artists and theoreticians.

19 March

kunstkammer workshop with presentations by Kirstin Kennedy (V&A) and Deanna Shemek (University of California, Irvine)

Two ten-minute presentations followed by discussion
Kunstkammer Reconstructions
The Medici Studiolo at the V&A
In December 2009 the new Medieval and Renaissance Galleries at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum opened to the public. Among the objects redisplayed were 12 roundels depicting the ‘Labours of the Months’ from the workshop of Luca della Robbia (ca. 1450-56), commissioned by Piero de’ Medici for his studiolo in the Palazzo Medici, Florence. The study, said by contemporaries to inspire the greatest admiration in anyone who entered, was destroyed during reconstruction of the Medici palace in 1659. The redisplayed roundels in the V&A galleries reflect their original position and context in a gallery that explores fifteenth and sixteenth century intellectual and artistic ideals in Western Europe.’
Kirstin Kennedy is curator of metalwork 1450-1900 at the V&A, and was part of the concept team responsible for the Medieval and Renaissance Galleries.
Reassembly and Imagination: The Virtual Studiolo of Isabella d'Este
The famed studiolo of Isabella d'Este (d. 1539) in Mantua survives as an architecturally altered, nearly empty space within the city's Museum of the Ducal Palace, while  objects that once filled the spaces of the grotta and studiolo  now reside in museum collections,  in spaces not remotely resembling the rooms where their original collector housed them. The Virtual Studiolo project within Isabella d'Este Archive offers a virtual, immersive context--a digital thought experiment--in which to imagine the collection reassembled. This presentation will discuss challenges, solutions, and future options for the project.
Deanna Shemek is Professor of Italian and European Studies at the University of California, Irvine.  She is author of Ladies Errant: Wayward Women and Social Order in Early Modern Italy (1998) and of In Continuous Expectation: Isabella d’Este’s Reign of Letters (2021). Her collaborative editing includes Phaethon’s Children: The Este Court and its Culture in Early Modern Ferrara (2005), Writing Relations: American Scholars in Italian Archives (2008), and Itinera chartarum: 150 anni dell’Archivio di Stato di Mantova (2019). She edited and co-translated Adriana Cavarero’s Stately Bodies: Literature, Philosophy, and the Question of Gender (1995). Her edition and translation of the Selected Letters of Isabella d'Este (2017) won the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women’s 2018 prize for the best translation of a woman’s work. She co-directs IDEA: Isabella d'Este Archive, an online project for study of the Italian Renaissance.

27 February

guided tour by Małgorzata Biłozór-Salwa, Urszula Dragońska, Małgorzata Łazicka,
Izabela Przepałkowska, Przemysław Wątroba (Print Room University of Warsaw)

Twenty-minute presentation followed by discussion
The Print Room of the University of Warsaw Library:a Virtual Tour of the Collection
The Print Room of the University of Warsaw Library was established in 1818. Currently the collection has approximately 50,000 original artistic and architectural drawings and prints created between the sixteenth and twenty-first century: single leaf prints and bound volumes. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are the most comprehensively represented with works principally by Western European artists. The core of the holdings consisted of King Stanisław August Poniatowski’s collection, purchased from his successors in 1818 for the University of Warsaw. Stanisław Kostka Potocki donated part of his own collection, which included sixteenth- to eighteenth-century prints and drawings by European masters, to the university in the years 1818-1821.
Between 1924 and 1939 the collections grew thanks to purchases and donations. The most important and largest series to enhance the collections at that time were: the archives of Tilman van Gameren (seventeenth-century architectural drawings), the collection of Dominik Witke-Jeżewski (eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architectural drawings), a gift of Izydor Krzemicki (sixteenth to eighteenth-century chiaroscuro woodcuts) and a loan from Henryk Grohman (Western European and Polish graphic art created at the turn of the twentieth century). After the Second World War, the collection of Stanisław Patek as well as the collections from Łańcut belonging to the Princes Lubomirski (eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architectural drawings) were also transferred to the university.
The collection of sixteenth– to twentieth-century artistic drawings contains almost 3,500 works by masters of European schools, as well as by Polish artists and foreigners who were then active in Poland. The very valuable series of architectural and decorative drawings is closely connected to the history and culture of Poland. The Old Master Prints are represented by the sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Italian, German and Netherlandish artists, as well as seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French, Flemish and Dutch engravers and schools. The beginnings of modern prints can be traced back to the works of outstanding European, Polish and American artists from the second half of the nineteenth century.
Małgorzata Łazicka is an art historian, a curator of Old Master Prints in the Print Room of the University of Warsaw Library and a Ph.D. candidate at the Doctoral School of Humanities at the University of Warsaw, where she also received MA in art history. Her research is focused mainly on the 16 th -century graphic arts of German-speaking countries. One of the results of her research was a catalogue of prints by Barthel and Sebald Beham from the
collection of the Print Room (2019). The subject of her Ph.D. thesis concerns Crispin Scharffenberg as the woodcutter and printer. Recently she was a member of the project
Colour Printing and Print Painting in the Kingdom of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania (ca. 1470-1600) researching, inter alia, painted prints and technical aspects of print colouring (2020-2023).

30 January

lecture by Franciszek Skibiński (Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and National Museum in Gdańsk)

Forty-minute lecture followed by discussion
Guild Objects from the Cities of former Royal Prussia
For centuries, guilds were a key element of professional, social and political life in the cities of former Royal Prussia – Gdańsk (Danzig), Toruń (Thorn) and Elbląg (Elbing). Many items, such as cups and chests kept in guild houses or chapel furnishings, were associated with their activities. With the profound changes taking place from the end of the 18th century onwards, the importance of guilds diminished, and the objects they used gradually became collectible and museum items. The lecture will present the history of these objects, from their origins, through their use by the guilds, until they became collectible items. The topic presented is linked to the exhibition ‘Communities of Work and Faith. Guilds in the Cities of Royal Prussia' at the National Museum in Gdansk (September-November 2024).
Franciszek Skibiński holds a PhD from Utrecht University. He is an assistant professor at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland, where held a position of the Vice-dean responsible for scholarly matters and international exchange. Currently, he is also the Vice Director for scholarly matters at the National Museum in Gdańsk. In his research he explores the phenomenon of artistic exchange in Early Modern Europe, especially with regard to sculpture and architecture.
Recently, he published a book on Willem van den Blocke. A Sculptor from the Low Countries in the Baltic Region (Brepols, 2020). His other publications include ‘Early Modern Netherlandish Sculptors in Danzig and East-Central Europe. A study in dissemination through interrelation and workshop practice’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 63 (2013), and 'Between Paris, the Low Countries and the Baltic: an episode in the history of artistic exchange in sixteenth-century Europe’, Arts et artistes du Nord a la cour de Francois Ier, eds. Laure Fagnart and Isabelle Lecocq, Paris 2017.

2024

19 December

workshop: Iberian Art in Central and Eastern European Collections with presentations by Veronika Červená (Lobkovicz Collection), Martyna Łukasiewicz (National Museum in Poznan)

Two ten-minute presentations followed by discussion

The Collection of Spanish works owned by the Lobkovicz Family
Members of the Lobkowicz family were inextricably linked to the Spanish court and the culture of the Iberian Peninsula in general. Maria Manrique de Lara y Mendoza (c. 1538–1608), who married Vratislav II of Pernstein in 1555, played a crucial role in the penetration of these influences. One of their descendants was Polyxena of Pernstein (1566–1642), whose second husband was Zdenko Adalbert Popel of Lobkowicz (1568–1628). Through this marriage, part of the collection of Maria Manrique came into the possession of the Lobkowiczs, who brought a whole range of art objects with her from Spain and, after moving to Bohemia, still had them sent directly from Spain, including paintings. This created an extensive portrait gallery of European renown, some of whose works will be presented in the lecture.
Mgr. Veronika Červená currently works as Assistant of Curator of the Lobkowicz Collections. She studied Art History at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, and is continuing her doctoral studies at the Academy of Arts Architecture & Design in Prague.

Les Arts En Portugal. Iberian artworks in the collection of Athanasius Raczyński
In 1848 Athanasius Raczyński (1788–1874), Polish Count and diplomat in service of the Kingdom of Prussia, travelled from Lisbon, via Cadiz and Seville to Madrid to start his diplomatic mission and at the same time an intense stay in the Kingdom of Spain. Holding a prominent position among the European diplomatic elite, having extensive contacts in political spheres, a sharp eye, and analytical skills, in a short period of time, Raczyński became not only a keen observer and skilful commentator of political and social life but also an active participant of the artistic scene first in Portugal and then in Spain. Reflecting on Raczyński as a connoisseur and active collector leads to his interest in both Portuguese art (he was a keen researcher and the author of pioneering book on Portuguese art, entailed Les Arts en Portugal), and Spanish Old Masters paintings. The result of his interest was the acquisition of masterpieces such as the Madonna of the Rosary by Francisco de Zurbarán, the purchase of which was widely commented in the press, as well as works by José de Ribera, José Antolinez or Juan Carreño de Miranda to his gallery. The collection, along with an extensive archive, sheds light on a vibrant Spanish and Portuguese visual culture, collecting practices, and networks seen from a perspective of a prominent collector.
Martyna Łukasiewicz is an art historian and curator at the National Museum in Poznan. She is a PhD candidate in art history with a dissertation dedicated to 19th century Danish museology. Her research interests encompass the 19th-century European painting, museology, and the history of collecting. She curated the first exhibition of Vilhelm Hammershøi in Poland (2021/2022). She presented her research findings at various international conferences, including the University of Copenhagen, University of Oxford, Humboldt University of Berlin, and University of Geneva. She is a member of CODART, the Association for Art History, the Association of Art Historians in Poland.

28 November

Marzia Breda: Guided tour to the Zoological Collection of the Museum of Nature and Humankind, University of Padua

Twenty-minute video followed by discussion
The original core of the zoological collections of the University of Padua is the extensive naturalistic collection by Antonio Vallisneri sr., who held the chair of Medicine in our Athenaeum from 1700 to his death in 1730. His homonymous son, Antonio Vallisneri jr., donated the collection to the University of Padua in 1734 and he was thus awarded the first chair of Natural History and entrusted with the care of this extensive collection, then known as “Museo Vallisneriano”. At his death, in 1777, the collection suffered the first of a series of states of abandon, the chair being resumed only in 1806 by Stefano Andrea Renier. The following directors gave minor contributions to the zoological collection up to 1869. In this year, the chair and the collection was divided into two lots: Geology and Mineralogy on one side, Zoology and Comparative anatomy on the other, this latter was assigned to Giovanni Canestrini. Canestrini, who kept the chair up to his death in 1900, is mainly known for translating into Italian “The Origin of Species” and for his studies on mites and other arachnids.
The brand new zoological exhibition is organized in a lower floor, dealing with aquatic animals, and an
upper floor, displaying terrestrial specimens. Life began in the sea, where the vast majority of animal
groups developed and still live, including the fascinating large marine vertebrates, a marvellous example of convergent evolution. Brackish and fresh water environments are a good example of how habitat disturbance and introduction of alien species can threaten native fauna. On the upper floor, modern cylinder cases host a variety of terrestrial invertebrate groups, among which insects take the lion’s share.
Large mammals are represented by skeletons and taxidermied specimens, mostly from the first half of the nineteenth century, giving the dedicated room a quite historical flavour. The same applies to exotic birds and large birds of prey, while terrarium-style display cases host a mostly modern reptile collection. The zoological itinerary ends with a video, inviting visitors to reflect on how our daily actions can be transformed into virtuous behaviours to fight the climate crisis that is endangering our planet.
Marzia Breda is a specialist in large mammals from the Ice Age (the Quaternary); for several years she has carried out her research in Italy and abroad (at the Natural History Museum, London), studying many European collections of fossil mammals from the recent past, with a special interest in deer and rhinos. The main focus of her research is the reconstruction of the physical appearance of these animals, their diet, their chronological distribution, the interrelationships among fossil and living species within a certain evolutionary group. Over the years, she has taught several university courses, covering subjects from general palaeontology to vertebrate palaeontology, to Ice Age mammals. She currently teaches the course on “Evolution of Quaternary faunal complexes” at the University of Ferrara. Over recent years, she has developed an interest in public engagement and experience in cataloguing activities through a research fellowship at the University Museum Centre (CAM) of the University of Padua, where she was hired in 2021 as Curator of the Museum of Zoology, now the zoological section within the brand new Museum of Nature and Humankind. She thus dealt with the restoration, handling and transportation of the collection to the new venue and with the organization of the zoological displays in terms of specimens, panels, and multimedia.

24 October

Joanna Ciemińska, Universidade Nova de Lisboa and Palamusto

Lecture followed by discussion
The 'Chinese rooms' of Augustus of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg in Gotha and Stanisław Kostka Potocki in Wilanów in ca. 1820
This lecture will present a comparative reading of two Central European 'Chinese' rooms from c.1800: the Chinese Cabinet of Augustus, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg (1772‒1822) in Friedenstein Palace in Gotha and the Chinese Apartment of Count Stanisław Kostka Potocki I (1755‒1821) in Wilanów Palace in Warsaw. They were both early nineteenth-century examples of museum-style courtly settings dedicated to the presentation and study of a variety of Asian objects in a proto art historical approach, open to a selected audience. Both collections were partly constituted through important acquisitions on foreign art markets and inspired by English examples in their overall conception. Their original disposition is well documented, but they were redesigned in the later nineteenth century. I will examine the aims, composition, ways of display and means of producing knowledge about East Asia of these two Chinese apartments. The focus will be placed on the interactions of space with the various types of objects, including lacquerworks, stoneware, ivories, porcelain, paintings, furniture, textiles and ethnographica. This emphasis will help to understand the tensions between an almost three-centuries old tradition of courtly display of Asian objects and the newly emerging changes in art consumption entailed by the recent shift of paradigm, i.e., the emergence of the state museum and crystallisation of history of art and Asian studies as independent disciplines.
Joanna Ciemińska holds a B.A. and M.A. in History of Art and French Philology from the University of Warsaw. She is currently a PhD candidate in History of Art at Universidade Nova in Lisbon and is writing a dissertation on the practices of collecting and display of Asian porcelain and lacquer in early modern courtly spaces across Europe. Her doctoral work is part of the European Training Network PALAMUSTO, funded by EU Horizon 2020, which aims to write a new thematic history of the early modern European palace, focusing on the phenomena of cultural exchange. Her interests are centred on collecting, consumption, spaces of display and gift giving of non-European goods in the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

25 July

workshop: Collecting Drawings and Other Works on Paper with presentations by Eliška Zlatohlávková, Borbála Gulyás and Olenka Horbatsch

Three ten-minute presentations followed by discussion
Eliška Zlatohlávková
The Collection of Drawings of the Clary-Aldringen Family
The contribution will present one of the most important collections of Lombard Renaissance and Mannerist drawings kept since the second half of the seventeenth century in the Lands of Bohemian crown. In total about 200 drawings were glued onto sheets of papers and bound into two volumes. The contribution will introduce the content of both volumes and will mainly focus on the provenance and fate of this extraordinary collection that
was in the possession of the Clary-Aldringen family from North Bohemia until 1945.
Eliška Zlatohlávková studied Art History at the Department of Art History of Charles University, Prague. She gained her PhD with a theses on the iconography of Rudolf II before starting to work at Studia Rudolphina, the Research Centre for Visual Arts and Culture in the Age of Rudolf II. Currently, she works as scientific researcher at Palacký University Olomouc and Charles University in Prague. Her main research concerns art at the court of Rudolf II, spaces for art collections (studiolo, kunstkammer) and princely collections of the early modern era. She is co-author of the monograph From Studiolo to Gallery, Secular Spaces for Collections in the Lands of the Bohemian Crown on the Threshold of the Early Modern Era and has written several articles dealing with collection spaces and collecting in the early modern era.
Borbála Gulyás
Calligraphic Manuscripts and Kunstkammern: George Bocskay’s Large-Format Writing Model Book in Ambras
The Hungarian calligrapher George Bocskay (d. 1575) prepared three writing model books for Emperors and Hungarian Kings Ferdinand I and Maximilian II of Habsburg between 1561 and 1573 in Vienna. In addition to his two small-format manuscripts, which were later decorated with miniatures by the Flemish artist Joris Hoefnagel for Emperor Rudolf II in the 1590s and very likely displayed in the Prague Kunstkammer. Bocskay dedicated a large-format volume to Ferdinand I in 1562 that showed up in the inventory of the Ambras Kunstkammer of Archduke Ferdinand II of Tyrol in 1596. The unique manuscript was displayed in Case No. 8 that exclusively contained the collection’s book-style rarities (manuscripts, prints and similar curiosities).
Borbála Gulyás is an art historian and Research Fellow of the Institute of Art History at the
Research Centre for the Humanities (formerly of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences), Budapest, Hungary. She is currently the Head of the Archives of the Institute. She received her PhD from the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest in 2013 for her thesis on the art and life of George Bocskay. Recently, she published her monograph on the artist (The Art of the Calligrapher George Bocskay, Budapest, 2023; Bocskay György kalligráfus művészete, Budapest, 2020). She is also an editor of a new Festschrift (Reneszánsz és barokk Magyarországon. Művészettörténeti tanulmányok Galavics Géza tiszteletére. Renaissance and
Baroque in Hungary. Studies in Art History in Honor of Géza Galavics, Budapest, 2021). She has a particular interest in manuscripts, prints and their collecting and in court culture and festivities of the early modern period. Website: https://mi.abtk.hu/en/staff/profile/gulyas
Olenka Horbatsch
The Status of Prints at the Court of Rudolf II
Printmaking at the court of emperor Rudolf II represents the apogee of engraving as an art form. The emperor patronized expansive print projects, and appointed Aegidius II Sadeler (c. 1568-1625) as the first-ever imperial engraver. Sadeler introduced new techniques, formats, and subjects into his ambitious prints. Hendrick Goltzius and Jan Muller, who were based in the Netherlands and worked after designs from Prague by Rudolf’s court artists, brought new refinement to the art of engraving by using swelling lines to convey volume. Prints produced in and for Prague combined technical
innovations (both in terms of scale and complexity) with a new self-conscious interest in the history of printmaking in Europe, centered on the work of Albrecht Dürer. This paper investigates the status of prints in Rudolfine Prague, from technical and art theoretical perspectives, and queries the role of prints in the emperor’s collection.
Olenka Horbatsch is (since 2017) Curator of Dutch & Flemish Prints and Drawings at The British Museum. She received her Ph.D. in 2017 from the University of Toronto with a dissertation on Lucas van Leyden and his contemporaries. She has curated
exhibitions and displays on Martin Luther’s legacy in print (2017), Rembrandt’s prints and drawings (2019) and Printmaking in Prague under Rudolf II (2021). She is working on a publication to share the results of research undertaken for the Prague exhibition.
She is also working on a research and catalogue project on early Netherlandish drawings in the British Museum’s collection. Her work has appeared in the Rijksmuseum Bulletin and in edited volumes published by Brepols, Routledge and British Museum
Press.

30 May

Claudia Swan, Washington University in St. Louis

Lecture followed by discussion
Featherwork in the Kunstkammer
In this presentation of work-in-progress, Claudia Swan will offer observations on the presence and role of featherwork artefacts, feathers, and other ornithological specimens in Kunstkammer collections from the early 16th century through to the early 18th century.
Claudia Swan is the Mark S. Weil Professor of Art History and Archaeology in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis, and a scholar of early modern northern European visual culture with a concentration in the Dutch world. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has published articles and book chapters on early modern art, science, and collecting; on the imagination; on Dutch visual culture; and on mediated goods, Dutch trade, and piracy. Recent publications include a special issue of NUNCIUS on early modern geometries; a study of Dutch liefhebberij as a market sensibility, her monograph Rarities of these Lands: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Dutch Republic (Princeton University Press, 2021), and the co-authored Conchophilia: Shells, Art, and Curiosity in Early Modern Europe (Princeton University Press, 2021).

25 April

Sarah Wagner, Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin; Corinna Gannon, Städel Museum, Frankfurt; Jessica Keating, Carleton College

Three ten-minute presentations followed by discussion
The Kunst- und Wunderkammer
Reviving the Berlin Kunstkammer
For three years, researchers from several disciplines studied the Berlin Kunstkammer in a DFG-funded project to find out about how much the collection, housed in the Berlin Palace from 1600 to the end of the nineteenth century, changed over nearly 300 years. The result was a book and a virtual research environment. While the book attempts to examine the biographies of selected objects, a source-based inventory reconstruction was undertaken in the virtual research environment. The talk will briefly present the two results.
Sarah Wagner is an art historian specializing in the cultural technique of collecting, collection documentation and semantic knowledge modelling. She has been working in academic institutions in the fields of exhibition and collection development since 2012. Recently, she published her dissertation on the history and development of the Kunst- und Wunderkammer in the museum. She is in the process of developing digital indexing models for the colonial contexts of the collections at the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin.
https://www.imhofverlag.de/buecher/the-berlin-kunstkammer/
https://berlinerkunstkammer.de/en

The Kunstkammer of Emperor Rudolf II as a Magical Space: Challenges and Possibilities to Approach a Lost Collection
Research on the Rudolfine Kunstkammer is made complicated by a number of factors. The
collection and the rooms that housed the Kunstkammer are no longer intact. Therefore, one needs to seek innovative approaches to reconstruct the collecting space, its contents and the underlying concept. This talk will look at the Prague Kunstkammer from the perspective of natural magic and alchemy, which Emperor Rudolf II was demonstrably fond of and present possible approaches to collecting items and to the rooms that once stored them. Magical and alchemical source material will be discussed as a possible key to unsolved questions, which might also be transferred to other collections of the time.
Corinna Gannon is an assistant curator at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main. From 2018 until 2022 she was research assistant at the department of art history at Goethe University and conducted a project on a portrait collection of Frankfurt physicians. Her monograph Die Porträtsammlung der Dr. Senckenbergischen Stiftung. Frankfurter Medizin- und Kunstgeschichten was published in 2022, while she also worked on her PhD project dedicated to the Rudolfine collection. Last November, she submitted her dissertation
'Efficacious artefacts. Visual strategies of natural magic in the Kunstkammer of Rudolf II'.

Artistic Formation in the Kunstkammer of Rudolf II
The art collection, or Kunstkammer, of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612) was filled with rare, precious and exotic objects, many of which were stored in the drawers of cabinets. Most of the unworked natural objects (naturalia) stored in these drawers—such as minerals, shells, and animal horns—were irregular and indeterminate in shape. These unworked specimens shared characteristics with the carved and mounted naturalia that were housed on tables and open shelves of the Kunstkammer. As such, the specimens stored in drawers were opportunities for imperial artists to determine form and seek out its various uses and meanings. This paper asks: how does our view of the imperial Kunstkammer shift if, in addition to a site of storage and an instrument of organization, we consider the cabinet drawer to be a site for viewing a natural specimen as an art object existing in potentia?
Jessica Keating is Associate Professor of Art History at Carleton College. Her research and teaching addresses the history of art in early modern Europe, focusing particularly on the intertwined histories of collecting; technology; cultural contact and exchange; and empire and sovereignty. Her book, Animating Empire: Automata, the Holy Roman Empire and the Early Modern World (Penn State University Press, 2018) explores the religious and political histories of six clockwork automata that were produced and collected in the Holy Roman Empire during the second half of the sixteenth century. Currently, she is working on the question of how the Kunstkammer of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (r. 1576-1612) represented sovereignty. She is also in the process of completing a short book, Impossible Nature: The World of Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

28 March

Éva Bicskei, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest

Recorded guided tour, followed by q&a and discussion

In early modern Europe, the first academic institutions dedicated to acquiring a complete
knowledge of the world were founded almost without exception with the patronage of the
monarchy. The fundamental condition necessary for these scholarly societies—or Gelehrtengesellschaft, learned society, or société savant, as they were called at the time—to operate was the creation of a language both usable in the field of science and comprehensible to the general public of the given state. The nineteenth century provided new impetus for the establishment of similar institutions, as during the period of nation building, these (newly-
founded) cultural institutions played a key role in the creation and dissemination of a national
consciousness.
These broader frameworks defined the primary goal of the Hungarian Learned Society, later called the Hungarian Academy of Sciences: the development of a standardized national language also suitable for the practice of the arts and sciences. The institution was founded in 1825 by a group of Hungarian magnates. Nevertheless, beside their yearly private financial donations, many patriots presented and bequeathed full libraries and thousands of valuable
objects, among them scientific instruments and artworks; curiosities and Antiquities, which belong
today to the Art Collection of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, established quite late, in
1994. Thus the Art Collection consists mainly, but not exclusively, of nineteenth- and twentieth-
century portraits of founders, presidents, secretaries and prominent members of the Academy,
and the remnants of several small historical and art collections donated to the institution during its existence. The guided tour reflects the history of the art institutions historically located in the building in the Academy as well; the arduous process of (re)searching the lost art objects of the Academy, as well.
Éva Bicskei (MA in History, PhD in Art History) is senior research fellow at the Institute of Art History at the Research Centre for Humanities. Her research focuses on the social, cultural and institutional history of nineteenth-century art in Hungary in European context. Her publications include a historical monograph on the Hungarian academic painter Bertalan Székely (Budapest, 2010); a monograph on the (scientific) collections of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Budapest, 2021); an edited volume on the history of the house of the
Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Budapest, 2018); two articles in a peer-reviewed international journal (Social Policy, Oxford; Male Bonds in Nineteeth Century Art, LUP, 2022); and numerous articles and chapters in collective volumes. Éva serves as Curator-in- Chief at the Art Collection of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, conceiving and organising numerous art exhibitions.

28 February

Markéta Ježková, Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences

Lecture of ca. 40 minutes followed by discussion
François Perrenot de Granvelle, Count of Cantecroix: A Renaissance Murderer, Thief and Art Lover in the service  of Rudolf II
François Perrenot belonged among the renaissance noble bad guys. He was sentenced to death for plotting to murder his wife; nevertheless, he acquired the famous Granvelle collection and sold the essential part of it to Rudolf II. The lecture will focus on his contacts with Rudolf II Habsburg.
Markéta Ježková studied French, Aesthetics and Art History. In 2019, she joined the Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences, as a postdoc researcher focusing on art collecting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly in circles associated with Rudolf II's court and digital humanities.
https://www.udu.cas.cz/en/lide/mgr-et-mgr-marketa-jezkova-ph-d

24 January

Oleksii Rudenko, Central European University, Vienna; Edina Zsupán, National Széchényi Library, Budapest;  Urszula Bończuk-Dawidziuk, Museum of the University of Wrocław

Workshop: Book Collections
Three ten-minute presentations followed by discussion
Books in Motion: Libraries and Classical Book Circulation in Early Modern East-Central Europe
This paper investigates the process of composition and changes in professorial and private libraries in three major cultural centres of early modern East-Central Europe - Poland, Ruthenia and Lithuania - in the sixteenth century. By exploring and comparing several known inventories of noble, private and monastic libraries, I elucidate the practices of collecting books and their circulation. I emphasize the interdependence between the access to most recent prints and history-writing and argue that studying the institutional framework of learning and libraries allows us to explain different kinds of history-writing and “national” myths og originf produced in these diverse intellectual environments in the early modern era.
Oleksii Rudenko is a PhD candidate in Comparative History and a Junior Member at the Center for Religious Studies at the Central European University in Vienna, currently volunteering for the Ukrainian army. He is working on his dissertation about the creation of the early modern myths of origins of Lithuania, Poland, as well as Ruthenia and on the effects of these myths on nation-making. His research interests include cultural transfer, cultural history, the history of humour, Renaissance libraries, classical reception and myth-creation in the early modern and modern eras.
King Matthias Corvinus's (1458–1490) Bibliotheca Corvina
The library of King Matthias Corvinus (1458–1490), the Bibliotheca Corvina is one of the most exciting royal book collections of from the age of Humanism and the Renaissance.
Because of the lack of written sources for its history, its study has been a challenge for about 150 years. Relying on new research, I will present in detail upon how the library was established, how its material was collected and what its sources were. Indeed, it has recently been revealed that the collections of educated Hungarian clerics had played a more important role in the development of the Corvina library than previously thought and so did the codices produced by the royal scriptorium in Buda. I will also suggest a new dating for the birth and
development of the Bibliotheca Corvina.
Edina Zsupán is a classicist with a special research interest in the history of humanist literature and ideas, in particular in fifteenth -century renaissance manuscripts related to Hungary (humanist philology, codicology, paleography, book illumination). She is a specialist of the Corvina Library, as well as the manuscripts of János Vitéz and Janus Pannonius. Edina currently works as research fellow and deputy head of department at the Eötvös Loránd Research Network-National Széchényi Library, Fragmenta et Codices Research Group.
The University Printing House in Wrocław 1726-1804 – a new exhibition in the Museum of the University of Wrocław
The university printing house in Wrocław operated from 1726 to 1804 as part of the Jesuit university founded in 1702 by Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I. Subsequent heads of the printing house were Jesuit professors of the Theology and Philosophy faculties. In the 1730s, the establishment was the largest printing house in the city. It flourished by fulfilling local and foreign commissions and issued prints in five languages: mainly Latin and German,
less often in Polish, and occasionally in French and Italian. Fonts of various typefaces, as well as black and red inks, were used (see image above).
The latest temporary exhibition in the Museum of the University of Wrocław displays prints from the University printing house when it was run by Jesuits in the eighteenth century in Wrocław. The exhibition attempts to show the wide thematic range of texts issued by the printing house, as well as the technical possibilities of typography and the skills of the printers. The exhibition is the result of comprehensive research of the university library holdings and is accompanied by the publication
of a bilingual catalogue (Polish and English).
Urszula Bończuk-Dawidziuk is an art historian and museologist. She studied in Wrocław, Frankfurt (Oder) and Warsaw. She held several important scholarships and is the author and co-author of books and numerous scientific articles. Urszula is a member of the Polish Association of Art Historians, the Association of University Museums in Poland, the Association of Polish Museologists, and the Silesian Historical Commission in Germany. Her research interests focus on the history of art and culture around 1800 and the history of museology in Wrocław.

2022

13 December

guided tour to Wilanow conducted by Anna Ziemlewska, Museum of King's Jan III's Palace at Wilanów

guided tour, followed by q&a and discussion
Pro publico bono – Collections in the Royal Residence at Wilanów
In the early nineteenth century, when there was no independent Polish state or state-run cultural
institutions such as museums and libraries, Stanisław Kostka Potocki - politician, amateur architect, archaeologist and collector created a diverse, eclectic collection (European and Polish paintings, ancient sculpture and vases, art of the Far East, furniture, Meissen porcelain) and made it available to the public in his palace at Wilanów, along with royal apartments and memorabilia of the first owners of the residence: King Jan III and Queen Maria Kazimiera.
Anna Ziemlewska, Phd, historian and museologist, is an employee of the District Museum in Toruń, Scientific Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Vienna. In 2017 she started to work at the Museum of King Jan III’s Palace at Wilanów; she has been a participant in research projects including: 'Karol Lanckoroński and his legacy in the collection of the Austrian National Library', 'Türkengedächtnis' and 'Monumenta Sobiesciana, the Fate of the Wilanów collection after 1939'.

29 November

Emilia Kłoda, Ossolineum (Wrocław), Prince Lubomirski's Collection

Lecture of ca. 40 minutes followed by discussion
The lecture is dedicated to Prince Henryk Lubomirski's collection that became the bedrock of the first public museum in Polish Lviv (nowadays Ukraine). Henryk Lubomirski (1777-1850) was the member of a rich and influential aristocratic family and he was raised among cosmopolitan art-lovers. His journey through Europe with Izabela Czartoryska and Stanisław Kostka-Potocki is an interesting example of the 18th-century education “on the road”. Henryk Lubomirski was a well-educated gentleman, art collector and political activist. In 1823, he decided to support Józef Maksymilian Ossoliński in the creation of the Polish cultural institution in Lviv. Ossolinski National Institute, together with the Museum Lubomirscianum, became a stronghold of Polish heritage in the times, when Poland as a sovereign state did not yet exist. Which artworks did the Lubomirski donate to the museum? Was the collection public or private? How has it changed through the last two centuries? The difficult history of the museum, its liquidation during WWII, the dispersion of the collection and the long process of its recreation in Wrocław, shows its transformation from a private endeavour to being a crucial part of the national heritage.
Emilia Kłoda is an art historian currently working in the Museum of the Lubomirski Princes at the Ossoliński National Institute in Wrocław. She has contributed to many research projects, e.g.“Virtual Museum of Baroque Ceiling Paintings in Silesia”, “Baroque Painting in Silesia” at the University of Wrocław, and “Scientific infrastructure for art-historical monuments in East Central Europe” at the Herder Institute in Marburg. In 2017, she received her PhD from the University of Wroclaw. Since 2018, she has been the curator of the Old Masters’ Drawings collection and the Paintings collection in the Museum of the Lubomirski Princes. Old Masters’ Drawings, Baroque painting, digital art history and museology are her main fields of interest.
website: https://wroc.academia.edu/EmiliaKłoda

26 July 2022

workshop on zoological collections: Angelica Groom, University of Brighton; Marzia Breda, University of Padua; Arturo Morgado Garcia, Universidad de Cádiz

Three ten-minute presentations followed by discussion
Angelica Groom: 'The Medici Menageries: Changing Cultures of Collecting and Display'
The collecting and display of zoological rarities during the early modern era played a significant role in the self-fashioning of the courtly elite, both in Europe and beyond. The Medici family, from the beginning of their reign in 1532 as Dukes of Florence, and from 1569 to 1737 as Grand Dukes of Tuscany, were enthusiastic collectors of rare fauna. This paper will focus on specific zoological spaces/sites that were established by the Medici family during their period of rule, with the aim of tracing shifting priorities both in the cultures of collecting and display of rare, wild and exotic animals.
Angelica Groom is senior lecturer in the School of Art and Media and on the programme of History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton. She is the author of a recently published monograph Exotic Animals in the Art and Culture of the Medici Court in Florence (Brill, October 2018), as well as several book chapters relating to art, animals, collecting and natural history.
https://research.brighton.ac.uk/en/persons/angelica-groom
Arturo Morgado Garcia, 'The work of Juan Bautista Bru and the Royal Cabinet of Madrid Collection (1784)'
The Royal Cabinet of Natural History in Madrid was one of the main examples of the scientific policy of Charles III of Spain. Its initial content was completed with specimens sent by Spanish colonial authorities, and the main pieces are described in the work written by Juan Bautista Bru, Collection of animals and monsters of the Royal Cabinet of Natural History of Madrid (1784). A few years later, the Cabinet would make its most spectacular contribution, the reconstruction of a megatherium, the first of a fossil in history.
Arturo Morgado-García is Full Professor of Cádiz University (Spain). His research focus is on Spanish social and cultural history, including topics such as clergy, slavery, witchcraft and zoohistory. He is the author of ten books and over one hundred papers, the most recent of which are Una metrópoli esclavista: el Cádiz de la Modernidad, La imagen del mundo animal en la España moderna and Las expediciones científicas en el siglo XVIII (in collaboration).
Marzia Breda: 'The Museum of Zoology, University of Padua'
The original core of the Museum of Zoology is the 1734 donation by Antonio Vallisneri jr. to the University of Padua, of the extensive naturalistic collection of his homonymous father, Antonio Vallisneri sr, professor of Medicine in Padua between 1700 and 1730. This donation granted Antonio jr the first chair of Natural History in our Athenaeum and entrusted him with the care of this extensive collection, then known as “Museo Vallisneriano”. At his death, in 1770, the collection suffered the first of a series of states of abandon, the chair being resumed only in 1806 by Stefano Andrea Renier. During Renier’s direction, many acquisitions, donations and expeditions enriched the collections of the museum of valuable specimens. The following directors gave minor contribution to the zoological collection (with the exception of Tomaso Antonio Catullo), until 1869. In this year, the chair and the collection was divided into two parts: Geology and Mineralogy on one side, Zoology and comparative anatomy to the other, this latter assigned to Giovanni Canestrini who kept the chair up to his death in 1900. Canestrini was a convinced evolutionist and put big effort in reordering and enriching the collection. During the 20th century, the Museum went through a period of decline due to the World Wars up to its total closure at the end of the 70s. At the beginning of our century it was reopened in a interim exhibition and is now part of the Museo della Natura e dell’Uomo (2022).
Marzia Breda is a specialist in large mammals from the Ice Age (the Quaternary) who for several years carried out her research in Italy and abroad (at the Natural History Museum, London), studying many Italian and foreign collections of mammal fossils, with a special interest in deer and rhinos. The main focuses of her research is the reconstruction of the physical appearance of these animals, their diet, their chronological distribution and the interrelationships among fossil and living species within a certain evolutionary group. Over the years, she has lectured at several university courses, spanning from general palaeontology to vertebrate palaeontology, to Ice Age mammals. Marzia currently teaches the course of “Evolution of Quaternary Faunal Complexes” at the University of Ferrara. In the last years she developed an interest in public engagement and experience in cataloguing activities through a research  fellowship at the Centre for University Museums (CAM) of the University of Padua, where she now is Curator of the Museum of Zoology.

26 July 2022
Axel Lapp (director civic museums) guided tour through museums in the city of Memmingen
Guided tour of the museum followed by live q & a session
Strigel-Museum and Antoniter-Museum at Antonierhaus focus on very local historical and art historical events, that reverberate through all of Europe and even the world.
Antonierhaus was built in the second half of the 15th century for the local branch of the Hospital Brothers of Saint Anthony, who had had the rights of patronage at Memmingen’s St. Martin Church since 1214. The four-winged complex included a hospital to look after sufferers of ergotism (‘Saint Anthony's fire’), an effect of long-term alkaloid poisoning through the ingestion of rye and other cereals infected by fungi.
The Strigel-Museum presents works by the artist family Strigel that was active in Memmingen for several generations around the time the Antonierhaus was erected, and their circle. The best known member of the family is Bernhard Strigel (~1460—4.5.1528), a favourite of Emperor Maximilian I, whose works today are held in many major museums. The collection in Memmingen today includes the painting through which the identity of Bernhard Strigel was re-established in 1908 by Wilhelm von Bode, after it had long been forgotten.
Axel Lapp has been the director of Strigel-Museum and Antoniter-Museum at Antonierhaus, as well as of MEWO Kunsthalle, in Memmingen for the past 10 years. He is a curator, writer and publisher with a strong expertise on contemporary art and museology. Axel studied at the Universities of Marburg, Essex and Manchester and held post-doctoral positions at the Universities of Leeds and Sunderland.  

21 June 2022

Barbara Murovec (Visiting Scholar at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz):
German, Italian and Slovenian National Heritage – Considered through Collecting of Cultural Objects in 1941/1942 and 1945/1946

Lecture of ca. 40 minutes followed by discussion

The lecture will analyse Slovenian examples of cultural heritage to show the characteristics of dealing with them during and immediately after the Second World War, as well as the practices of collecting and musealisation of objects in the Alpe Adria region. It will address the issue of institutional art history still being trapped in exclusive national narratives and its resulting applications.
How did the search for “national heritage” proceed in the first years of the Second World War and during the time immediately after the war on the territory of present-day Slovenia? Who inventoried cultural objects and for whom? How were new museums and collections created, on what (legal) basis and with “whose” objects? What were the reasons for the transfer of cultural objects? What was safe-guarded, restored, newly acquired or shown in exhibitions during the first years of German and Italian occupation? And how did these processes and phenomena continue, develop or change after the end of the war in Yugoslavia? How was and is national identity of cultural objects determined, and how might art historians think (differently) about their role and the meaning of identity in the context of the history of the discipline and the mission of institutions in the twenty-first century?
Barbara Kristina Murovec, Visiting Scholar at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut, studied art history and comparative literature in Ljubljana, Munich, Vienna and Graz. She obtained her PhD in Ljubljana in 2000 and her habilitation in Maribor in 2009, where she taught from 2010 to 2019. From 2005 to 2018, she was director of the France Stele Institute for Art History of the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and, from 2010 to 2016, she served as Secretary and Second Vice-President of RIHA (International Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art). Most recently Barbara was a guest scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. She coordinated several national and international projects; the monograph of the EU HERA project (2016 to 2020) Transfer of Cultural Objects in the Alpe Adria Region in the 20th Century (TransCultAA) was published by Böhlau in June 2022 (ed. together with Christian Fuhrmeister).

24 May 2022

Kunstkammer Workshop: Issues of Research and Terminology

Three ten-minute presentations followed by discussion

Andrea M. Gáldy, LMU
Introduction
Andrea is the founder of CCE. Her interest in the kunstkammer/studiolo is the result of her doctoral research on the collections of Cosimo I de’ Medici in sixteenth-century Florence.
Mark A. Meadow, UCSB
Specifying Knowledge: Quiccheberg on Prudence and Cognition
Mark A. Meadow is a professor of Northern Renaissance Art and the History and Theory of Museums. His research interests include the relationship of art and rhetoric, early-modern ritual and spectacle, and the origins of Kunst- and Wunderkammern and mutable concepts of value in collections and museums.
In his 1565 treatise on Kunst- and Wunderkammern, Samuel Quiccheberg utilizes specific terminology concerning the forms of knowledge produced by the collection. I will discuss two terms in particular – prudentia and cognitio – and their implications for our understanding of these early collections.
Renate Leggatt-Hofer, independent scholar
A New Separate Building to House the Collection in Vienna in 1558. Ferdinand I as Trendsetter?
Renate is an art historian who used to work for the Federal Monuments Authority Austria at the Scientific Inventory Department and as the Head of the Executive Department for Public Relations. She took part in the research project on the Vienna Hofburg organised by the Austrian Academy of Sciences (2010-16). Her main research interests include among others early modern art collecting displayed in residential architecture.
In 1558, a new kunstkammer building was erected in Vienna. It was the first known autonomous building in central Europe, exclusively designed to house the imperial collections. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the building was “swallowed” by newly built residential structures. Although there are few remains, its exact position, appearance and building history could be discovered and virtually reconstructed. It is the aim of this paper to discuss the idea of having a separate “museum” in Vienna and what it meant for the set-up of kunstkammern for the Habsburg dynasty and the Wittelsbach dukes Munich.
Eliška Zlatohlávková, Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci
Echoes of Rudolf II’s Kunstkammer in Peter Wok’s (1539–1611) Residence in Třeboň (Wittingau) – Spatial Organisation of Art Collections
Eliška is an art historian who has been working on the topic of Rudolfine art since her doctoral research at Charles University. Her present research focus is on collecting in the early modern era, in particular on spaces for the display of art collections in the lands of the Bohemian crown.
During the final years of his life, Petr Wok of Ro moved his residence to Třeboň, where he had a special building constructed by Italian architects and craftsmen to house his library and art collections. The rooms in which the collections were housed are reminiscent of the collection rooms of Rudolf II at Prague Castle.

26 April 2022

Elisabeth Reitter, Ambras Castle, Innsbruck, Austria, guided tour to the Museum of Castle Ambras
Tour of the Ambras Kunstkammer with a special focus on the Estate Inventory of 1596
Given the rather peaceful situation in Tyrol during the second half of the sixteenth century, Archduke Ferdinand II (1529 – 1595) was able to indulge his interests in the arts and sciences. He is known as one of the great renaissance collectors - i.e. the founder of the Ambras Collections.  Besides armour and weapons, portraits and books, he also collected copious amounts of objects for his kunst- and wunderkammer. Items made of rock crystal, gold and silver, hand stones, corals, as well as turned artefacts made of wood and ivory and artistic glass objects were housed in the kunstkammer together with exotic and peculiar naturalia. To accommodate his collections, Ferdinand built dedicated rooms - most of which are preserved to this day. Ambras can thus justifiably be described as one of the oldest museums in the world. The 1596 Estate Inventory describes the objects in the collection and provides information on the way in which they were stored and presented. The current museum presentation will be just as much a topic of the presentation as the contemporary description of the collections from the Estate Inventory.
Elisabeth Reitter studied Art History and French in Innsbruck and Padua/Italy. In January 2019, she started as project assistant at Ambras Castle /KHM Vienna on the edition of the 1596 inventory of Archduke Ferdinand's estate . In this inventory, all the objects in Archduke Ferdinand's many properties (Ambras Castle, Innsbruck Castle, Ruhelust, several hunting lodges) were recorded by hand, making it the most important source of the Ambras collections. The inventory transcipt will be turned into a database linked to the existing objects to index the collections of the Tyrolean archduke. The results of this work will be made accessible both digitally and in print.
To find out more, please visit:
https://www.khm.at/erfahren/forschung/forschungsprojekte/historische-projekte/das-nachlassinventar-erzherzog-ferdinands-ii-1529-1595-von-1596-inv-nr-kk-6652/
https://www.uibk.ac.at/dk-austrianstudies/doktorandinnen/reitter.html

22 March 2022

Štěpán Vácha (Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague): Emperor Rudolf II’s Paintings Collection Revisited: New Ideas and Perspectives

Lecture of ca. 40 minutes followed by discussion

Rudolf’s art collections represent an extensive field of research with a wide range of opinions. The current discourse oscillates between the idea of a private museum accessible only to the emperor and court artists and a semi-public collection conceived in the symbolic meaning as the form of sovereign representation. Scholars have mainly paid attention to the kunstkammer, but not as much to the paintings collection (picture gallery). The clues are clear: the collection was already scattered by the middle of the seventeenth century and there is no exact documentation of its original extent and shape. The use of computation methods and intensive team research raised new questions, which had not been asked yet. The lecture not only offers a fresh look at the location and spatial arrangement of the picture gallery but also encourages a rethinking of the relationship between the picture collection and Rudolf’s personality.
Štěpán Vácha, PhD, is a research scholar at the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences and editor-in-chief of the journal Studia Rudolphina. His primary research interest concerns Rudolfine and Baroque painting in Bohemia. He teaches art history at Charles University in Prague and the Academy of Fine Arts. Since 2020, he has been a principal investigator of the team research project "Art for Display: The paintings collection of Emperor Rudolf II within the context of collecting practices ca. 1600". For more information visit https://www.inventariarudolphina.com.

22 February 2022

Amber Collections Workshop: Ruth Sargent Noyes (National Museum of Denmark), Tomasz Grusiecki (Boise State University), Rachel King (The British Museum, London)

Three ten-minute presentations followed by discussion

Ruth Sargent Noyes: Amber materialities of Sanctity between the seventeenth-century Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Grand Duchy of Florence
My talk explores an exchange of luxury gifts in the 1670s-80s between Tuscan Grand Duke Cosimo III de’ Medici and scions of the Pacowie clan in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The Medici-Pacowie gift exchange climaxed in the translatio (ritual relocation) of relics of two early modern saints between Vilnius and Florence: Polish-Lithuanian prince Kazimierz Jagiellonczyk (1458-84) and Florentine nun Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi (1566–1607). In 1678 a femur bone of Kazimierz journeyed south; in 1683 hair and a tooth of Maria Maddalena traveled north, outfitted with sumptuous reliquary containers. My talk explores how intertwined discursive strands across epistemic fields—including theories of the emotions, hagiography, spiritual exercises, humoral theory, metaphorics and metaphysics of materials, and conceptual geography—converged in the series of reliquaries manufactured in Danzig (Gdańsk) and Florence of amber, ivory, rock crystal, diamonds, and silver to transport, safeguard, and exegete numinous bodily remains. With a particular focus on the discursive materiality of amber, which featured prominently not only in the reliquaries but also across the Medici-Pacowie gift exchange, and constituted an especially sought-after luxury material by the Medici both in its raw natural state and worked by human facture, I explore how the reliquaries’ haptic and thermal material facture not only instantiated a particular mode of sanctity associated with the saints enclosed within, but also indexed the emotional malleability of the pious devotee interacting with the relics, while also reifying period notions regarding cultural differences between southern and north-eastern Europe.
Ruth Sargent Noyes, PhD, is Marie Skłodowska-Curie EU Senior Research Fellow at the National Museum of Denmark (Copenhagen). Her research takes up the intersection of art, religion and science of the Early Modern period in its global context, with special focus on cross-cultural perspectives between Italy and Northern Europe, including Germany, the Low Countries, and the Nordic-Baltic region. A 2014 Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, Dr. Noyes currently leads a Marie Skłodowska-Curie EU Project, The art of (re)moving relics and reforming holiness in Europe’s borderlands (TRANSLATIO), from which her talk is taken.
Tomasz Grusiecki: A Material to Think With: Prussian Carved Ambers, Self-Reflexivity, and a New Geography of Art
There is no material linked more closely to early modern Prussia than amber, and both the Hohenzollerns (rulers of Brandenburg-Prussia) and the Vasas (overlords of Royal Prussia) used it extensively as diplomatic gifts, linking this prized material to their territories. Amber was also one of the most enigmatic materials of the period, with its alchemical nature often examined by natural philosophers who sought to determine its origins and physical makeup. Prussian artisans participated in these explorations by foregrounding amber’s metamorphic qualities. Many amber artefacts carved in Königsberg and Danzig self-reflectively depict the transformation of the Heliades (the Sun’s daughters) into poplar trees, an Ovidian trope important for the understanding of amber as a material that was once something else. This article explores how the physical properties of cups, caskets, and altarpieces carved in amber had consequences for how these objects were used and activated as a vehicle of elite sociability. By tapping into natural philosophy treatises, descriptions of places, gift records, and poetry, it proposes that amber’s material rhetoric was twofold: (first) to frame the geographically peripheral Prussia as a centre of cultural activity and material exploration; and (second) to simultaneously encourage the perception of amber-made artefacts as multivalent media capable of evoking multiple geographic locations, thus delving into transcultural implications of amber, a Prussian material that simultaneously publicized and obfuscated its origins.
Tomasz Grusiecki is Assistant Professor of Art History at Boise State University. He specialises in the study of visual and material culture in Poland-Lithuania, 1500-1700, focusing on early modern nationalism, cultural entanglement, and perceptions of selfhood and alterity. He is currently revising his first book, Transcultural Things and the Invention of Tradition in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania, contracted to Manchester University Press.
Rachel King: Making under the Microscope: Signed Ambers and the Stories they Tell
Although many early-modern objects made from Baltic amber – a fossilised resin extruded some 40 million years ago – survive today, they represent a fraction of what once was.
A small number of amber artisans were feted internationally in their own lifetimes. Celebrated craftspeople like Christoph Maucher or Christian Porschinen are not known to have signed their pieces, although pieces by and attributed to them exist. Conversely, a small number of signed works do survive. These are particularly significant, not least because they attest to the names of a small number of artisans.
This contribution will engage with works signed by and linked to craftsperson Jacob Heise, seeing these objects as a portal to a career about which absolutely nothing is known for the records of the Königsberg guild records are no longer extant. How can approaches developed by historians of material culture help us understand who Heise was, where, how and when he trained and worked, who he worked with, and the routes he took to market?
This contribution explores the ways in which engaging closely with surviving objects can raise and answer questions, as well as enrich and be enriched by recent work on the cultural, natural and material history of amber in the early-modern era.
Rachel King, PhD is Curator of Renaissance Europe and the Waddesdon Bequest at the British Museum, London. She has previously held curatorial positions at The Burrell Collection, National Museums Scotland, and the Bavarian State Museums and Galleries. Her articles on early-modern amber in Italy and elsewhere have been important in garnering greater scholarly attention for the history of European interest in this material. Rachel’s book Amber. Nature and Culture, a Global History of Amber, is forthcoming with Reaktion Books.

25 January 2022

Baiba Vanaga, Rundāle Palace Museum: Rundāle Palace Museum: The Rebirth of the Ducal Residence
Recorded guided tour to the Rundāle Palace Museum (Latvia) followed by live q&a session
The Russian court architect Francesco Rastrelli designed Rundāle Palace for the Duke of Courland, Ernst Johann Biron. Although the palace was built between 1736 and 1740, the interior decorations were finished later, between 1765 and 1768. Duke Peter, son of Duke Ernst Johann, can be considered a serious art collector and part of his collection was also kept in Rundāle Palace. In 1795, after the annexion of the Duchy of Courland by the Russian Empire, the last Duke Peter left Courland and took the furnishings of his palaces to his properties abroad. The interior objects and works of art accumulated during the nineteenth century by later owners of Rundāle Palace were moved to St. Petersburg before World War I.
The Rundāle Palace Museum was founded in 1964 as a branch of the Bauska Museum of Regional Studies and Art. In 1972, it became an independent museum. At the time when the museum was established the premises of the palace were completely empty. The accommondation of the museum in the former summer residence of the Dukes of Courland determined to a certain degree the nature of its collections. The palace interior arrangement is aimed at reflecting the former functional role of the rooms, echoing the tastes of the former owners and creating the best possible collection of fine and decorative arts. The tour will focus on the museum’s collecting history.
Baiba Vanaga is an art historian and head of the Art Research Department at the Rundāle Palace Museum. She studied art history and theory at the Art Academy of Latvia and museology at the Latvian Academy of Culture. In 2015, she received her doctorate from the Art Academy of Latvia. Her research interests are women artists, historical collections and the artistic life in Latvia from the late eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth centuries.
Baiba has published on women artists in Latvia; two essays on historical collections are forthcoming: "The Art Collection of Duke Peter of Courland" (proceedings of the conference For the Eyes and for the Soul: Private Art Collections in Lithuania, organised by the National Museum of Lithuania and the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute; Vilnius) and "Women Artists’ Works in Public Collections in Latvia, 1870–1918’ (Proceedings of the Art Museum of Estonia, issue 11 (16): Women Artists in Baltic and Nordic Museums; Tallinn).

2022

14 December 2021

Julia Rössel (KONDA, Foto Marburg), Spaces of Collecting: From Physical Matter to Digital Object

Lecture of ca. 40 minutes followed by discussion

Prints were always made to circulate through time and space. When they would join a collection they were extracted from the art marked and, so it seems, they would stop their circulation for a while to stay there. They would be glued in albums or fixed within a mount. Within the collection the physical object is relatively fixed in space within the topological structure of a spacial and virtual classification system. What happens next?

By cataloguing objects in museum databases, by reproducing it via digital photography and by publishing text and image information of the object on the museums website or aggregating databases like Europeana the print is also circulating as a digital object.

The lecture asks which paths a print being part of a Museum’s collection took before and takes within the Museums space. I like to describe this journey as a sequence of transformations and translations that changes the object itself in certain ways.

As example, I will follow the path of a print from the prints and drawings collection of the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum in Brunswick.

Julia Rössel completed her studies in art history and book studies the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz by the with a master's thesis on almanacs from Paris publishers during the reign of Louis XIV. Since 2014, she has been working on her doctorate under Salvatore Pisani at Gutenberg-University Mainz on the topic "Change of Media Systems - Graphic Collections and their Digital Translation". In addition to various study visits to the Statens Museum in Copenhagen, the Kunstistorisches Institut in Florence and the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, she worked as an art mediator at the Städelmuseum Frankfurt and the Museum Wiesbaden. She has been working as research assistant in the project Kupferstichkabinett Online of the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel. Currently she is project coordinator for an interdisciplinary project in the field of digital humanities at Philipps University Marburg.

23 November 2021

University Collections Workshop:

Urszula Bończuk-Dawidziuk (Museum of the University of Wrocław), Fabienne Huguenin (The Museum of the University of Tübingen MUT), Sofia Talas (Museum of the History of Physics at the University of Padua)

Three ten-minute presentations followed by discussion

Urszula Bończuk-Dawidziuk

Between Science and Education. Historical Collections at the University on the Example of the University of Wrocław

Collecting at universities has been practiced from the start. Universities needed research and teaching facilities and collected objects that were useful during lectures and classes with students. Today's universities own historical, scientific and didactic collections that reflect the history of the university, its structural and material transformations. This is also the case with the University of Wrocław, which takes care of its historical collections. The exception of the University of Wrocław, however, is that in 1945 it changed its nationality (from German to Polish). Its collections have largely been dispersed, partly also destroyed. Research in this extremely interesting cultural heritage shows that over the centuries, an attempt to balance the scholarly interests of professors managing collections with teaching at the university is evident in university collections.

Urszula Bończuk-Dawidziuk is an art historian and museologist. She studied in Wrocław, Frankfurt (Oder) and Warsaw. She held several important scholarships and is the author and co-author of books and numerous scientific articles. Urszula is a member of the Polish Association of Art Historians, the Association of University Museums in Poland, the Association of Polish Museologists, and the Silesian Historical Commission in Germany. Her research interests focus on the history of art and culture around 1800 and the history of museology in Wrocław.

Fabienne Huguenin

The Museum of the University of Tübingen MUT

The Museum of the University of Tübingen MUT was founded as a central facility of the University of Tübingen in 2006. It functions as an umbrella institution for the approximately 70 university collections. Some of the tasks of the MUT are to organise the scientific collections responsibly, to preserve them for future generations and to make them usable for research, teaching, public education and profiling of the university. The determination of the origin of objects and human remains as well as the evidence of possible contexts of injustice has also been recognised as an important research desideratum. Some examples illustrate the challenges we face.

Fabienne Huguenin studied Art History, Classical Archaeology and Romance Languages in Tübingen and Djon. After completing her doctorate in Art History in 2011, she worked on several digitisation projects at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, most recently as team leader in the project „Deutsches Museum Digital“ for the scientific indexing of the holdings of the object collection, the archive and the library. She was also responsible for acquiring third-party funding in the field of provenance research at the Research Institute for the History of Science and Technology. Her second book, an inventory catalogue of the portrait painting collection of the Deutsches Museum in Munich, received the publication prize of the museum. Since August 2020, Fabienne Huguenin has been a research associate at the Museum of the University of Tübingen MUT. Her areas of focus include collection and provenance research as well as third-party funding acquisition.

Sofia Talas

The new History of Physics Museum in Padua - Exploring the Potentialities of a University Physics Collection

The Museum of the History of Physics holds thousands of scientific instruments that were used for physics research and teaching in Padua from the 18 th century onwards. It was founded in 1995. We have just developed a project to renovate the Museum, with the aim of shedding new light on the potentialities of Padua university physics collection.

The paper will discuss some of the main peculiarities of the new display, which actually brings the public into Padua's Cabinet of Physics to show how physics was taught and studied in Padua from the 18th century onwards. We will see how connections with the global developments of physics, as well as links with other disciplines, such as art and architecture, emerge from Padua collection of scientific instruments. Stories of successes and failures come to light, often connected to the political, social and economic context, and we will see how instruments themselves offer food for thought on current issues in science and society.

Sofia Talas is curator of the Museum of the History of Physics at the University of Padua. Her research focuses on scientific instruments, their history and interpretation. From 2011 to 2017, she was President of Universeum, the European network aiming at the preservation and promotion of academic heritage. Sofia is currently a Board member of the History of Physics Group (European Physical Society) and the Scientific Instrument Commission (International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science).

18 October 2021

Franciszek Skibiński (Gdańsk National Museum) The National Museum in Gdańsk: Collection, War Losses, Research, Guided tour to the National Museum in Gdańsk

Recorded guided tour of the museum followed by live q & a session

The National Museum in Gdańsk was established by the merger of two institutions: the City Museum (est. 1870) and the Museum of Applied Arts (est. 1881). The core collection of Jacob Kabrun (1759–1814) comprises several thousand paintings, drawings and prints by European masters from the end of the fifteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. In the first half of the twentieth century the museum further enriched its collection by acquiring works by modern German artists. Since a large part of the original collection was lost in 1945, the National Museum is now rebuilding and developing its collection, while actively researching its history before and after 1945.

The tour will focus on the museum’s history, war losses and acquisitions as well as current research by the curatorial team. It will be hosted by Franciszek Skibiński, PhD, Vice Director of the Museum and Magdalena Mielnik, PhD, head of the Pre-1945 Fine and Applied Arts Department.

Franciszek Skibiński holds a PhD from Utrecht University. He is assistant professor at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland, where he held a position of Vice-dean responsible for scholarly matters and international exchange. Currently, he is  Vice Director for scholarly matters at the National Museum in Gdańsk. In his research he explores the phenomenon of artistic exchange in Early Modern Europe, in particular in relation to sculpture and architecture.

Recently, he published a book Willem van den Blocke. A Sculptor from the Low Countries in the Baltic Region (Brepols, 2020). His other publications include "Early Modern Netherlandish Sculptors in Danzig and East-Central Europe. A study in dissemination through interrelation and workshop practice." Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 63 (2013), and "Between Paris, the Low Countries and the Baltic: an episode in the history of artistic exchange in sixteenth-century Europe." In Arts et artistes du Nord a la cour de Francois Ier, eds. Laure Fagnart and Isabelle Lecocq, Paris 2017.

20 July 2021

Orsolya Bubryák (Institute of Art History, Research Centre for the Humanities, Budapest)Hans Steininger (1552–1634) and his ‘studio famosissimo’ in Augsburg

Lecture of ca. 40 minutes followed by discussion

The lecture will be dedicated to the Kunstkammer of Hans Steininger (1552–1634), a wealthy textile merchant of Augsburg. Although less well-known today, the collection was one of the most prestigious collections of its times in Augsburg and mainly comprised paintings and antique statues. Hans Steininger built his collection in the 1610s and 1620s, but it was sold off by his son not long after Steininger’s death, in the 1640s. The high quality of the collection is proven by the fact that pieces from it were purchased by the greatest collectors of the day including Ferdinand III, Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I, Duke of Bavaria, Christina, Queen of Sweden, Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici Among the prospective buyers also was Cardinal Jules Mazarin.

The only item of Steininger’s Kunstkammer known so far was a painting cycle on a mythological theme by Paris Bordone which has long been traced back to the Fugger family and which was believed to be acquired by Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria. Some of these paintings have even been identified in the imperial collections of Vienna and Prague. The lecture will argue that Hans Steininger neither owned the paintings associated with him by researchers nor that he acquired them from the Fugger. Neither were the works of Paris Bordone sold by his heir in Vienna nor were they purchased by Archduke Leopold Wilhelm. Rather, the presentation will show how Steininger's painting cycle by Paris Bordone can be reconstructed, which of his works of art were acquired by the imperial family and which painting can actually be traced back to the Fugger family.

Orsolya Bubryák, PhD, is an art historian, senior research fellow at the Institute of Art History, Research Center for the Humanities (former Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences), Budapest, Hungary. She received her doctorate in art history from the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest in 2010. Between 2011 and 2013 she was chief curator of the Art Collection of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Since 2016 she has been editor-in-chief of the Ars Hungarica, scholarly journal published by the Institute of Art History. She is the author of two books: Family History and its Visual Representation. Collections of the Erdődy Castle in Galgóc (2013) [in Hungarian] and Collecting Clues. In Search of an Art Collector in Seventeenth-Century Vienna (2018) [in English]

22 June 2021

Armoury Workshop with
Maurizio Arfaioli (Medici Archive Project, Florence),
Stefan Krause (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna),
Szabolcs László Kozak (ELTE-MTA, Budapest)

Three ten-minute presentations followed by discussion

Maurizio Arfaioli

The Medici Armoury in its European Courtly Context

In 1775, the Lorraine Grand Dukes of Tuscany finally (and regrettably) scattered what was left of the Medici armoury in the Palazzo Ducale (Palazzo Vecchio). It had been equal – and often superior – to any of the other great European dynastic collections of arms and armour. Its formation had however followed a rather unique trajectory. The Medici had become Dukes of Florence as late as in 1532 and as such were a new, late and, in many respects, unwelcome addition to the Italian and European aristocratic system.

As an enclave in a largely republican context, the small and new court of Cosimo I de’ Medici (1519-1574), second duke of Florence and future first Grand Duke of Tuscany, presented itself as more “martial” than most, lacking much of the veneer of ceremony and etiquette that characterised other, well-established Italian princely families. The guardaroba (the office in charge of the ducal household’s moveable goods) handled the flow of weapons and ammunition which sustained the court’s military lifestyle and functions, making of the Palazzo Ducale “slightly less than an arsenal, much more than a personal armoury.” This short presentation will discuss the origins and later development of the Medici armoury.

Maurizio Arfaioli is Senior Research Fellow at the Medici Archive Project (MAP) in Florence, overseeing scholarly research activities involving the Project’s digital platform (BIA). He has published essays and articles on Florentine military history and iconography. In 2019, he curated an exhibition at the Uffizi on the Medici German Guards. Maurizio’s current projects focus on the Florentine military system during the reign of Cosimo I de’ Medici and on the Italian troops in Spanish service in the Low Countries.

Stefan Krause

Heroes and Ancestors – Habsburg Armour Collecting

The Imperial Armoury in Vienna numbers among the best of its kind in the world. It preserves the key parts of the former imperial armoury, i. e. the collection of arms and armour for war, tournament and representation for the personal use of members of the Habsburg family. The two most important sources of the collection are the former imperial armoury in Vienna and the collection of Archduke Ferdinand II of Tyrol at Ambras Castle near Innsbruck.

The origin of the Habsburg armoury in Vienna can be traced back to the early 15 th century, but the core of this collection dates from the Renaissance. As early as the Middle of 16 th century we have the first archival documents proofing historic armour of family members to be kept in the imperial palace for dynastic reasons. The most important Habsburg armoury in Vienna was housed at the so called Stallburg-Wing of the Palace. At first installed for the personal use of the young Emperor Maximilian II it continued to be used as an armoury with museum-like installation well into the 18th century.

Archduke Ferdinand II. of Tyrol is one of the most important collectors of arms and armour of all times. At Ambras, he realised a very early systematic presentation of objects based on a novel museum idea of methodically collecting. The core of his armour collection was the Heroes’ Armoury with armours that had been owned by famous personalities of his and previous times. He wanted his armoury to preserve the memory of their deeds and to emphasize the leading historical role of the Habsburg dynasty.

Stefan Krause is Ronald S. Lauder Director of the Imperial Armoury at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. He studied Art History at the University of Vienna. In 2010, he was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 2014, he was Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

His research focuses on arthistorical and cultural aspects of arms and armour, particularly from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. He has published on the decoration of German renaissance armour, armour as fashion, the history of the Habsburg collections and tournament manuscripts. One of his most recent publications is: Fashion in Steel. The Landsknecht Armour of Wilhelm von Rogendorf (Yale University Press 2017).

Szabolcs László Kozak

Arms and Armour at the Royal Court of Hungary in the Late Middle Ages: Collecting, Exchange and Use

In 1408, Sigismund of Luxemburg (1387–1437) moved his court from Visegrád to Buda castle. Entries from the royal account books tell us that the court employed several weaponsmiths. Precious arms were a symbol of high status and nobility; therefore the Hungarian kings tried to impress their illustrious guests with tournaments, processions and military games. Late mediaeval sources indicate the existence of a royal armoury in the royal palace, destroyed in 1686 during the recapture from the Ottomans. From accounts, testaments and reports of envoys we know about the colour schemes in the rooms and can also indentify some of the objects once stored in the castle.

At the turn of the fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries, Prince Sigismund (then King of Poland) spent a few years in Buda as the guest of his older brother Wladislaus, King of Hungary. His account books provide precise details of the court‘s everyday life, including information on dozens of target shooting games and jousts. The court’s account books also suggest that the tournaments were executed by a handful of professionals during the reign of the Jagellonian dynasty. The kings’ amourers (politors) maintained the equipment for knightly jousts (rennen and stechen).

Szabolcs László Kozak is a mediaevalist historian and PhD student at ELTE University, Budapest and has been working on projects related to mediaeval and renaissance arms and armour at the Hungarian National Museum. In 2020, he started to work at ELKH (ELTE–MTA) as a research assistant.

Szabolcs believes in a comprehensive scientific approach including craftsmen and guilds as well as technical aspects. As part of his ongoing PhD research, he has published on the production of weapons and on civic roles in self-defence and parades,  arsenals and military games (shooting games and jousting) in the most important cities of Transylvania during the late middle ages. Arms and armour are therefore regarded as part of the mediaeval culture uniting practice and fashion.

In his recent work, Szabolcs focuses on the late Royal Armoury of Buda.

18 May 2021

Aistė Bimbirytė–Mackevičienė (Kazys Varnelis House-Museum)

Guided tour to the Kazys Varnelis House-Museum

Recorded guided tour to the museum followed by live discussion

The house-museum of the artist and collector Kazys Varnelis (1917–2010) is reminiscent of a residential house. Its small rooms rich in details of early Gothic architecture contain the exhibits of historical prints, maps and Western European sculptures, supplemented by sets of Renaissance and Baroque furniture and abstract paintings by Varnelis.

Harmony based on contrast makes the entire exhibition extraordinary. Accumulated for fifty years and given to Lithuania, Kazys Varnelis’s collection is a significant contribution to the collections of cultural treasures of Lithuania. It enriches the existing collections and introduces new principles of building an exhibition.

Aistė Bimbirytė-Mackevičienė’s main research focus is on the history of collecting in Lithuania and on the traditions of Lithuanian aristocratic culture with its links to Western Europe. In 2019, she gained her PhD from the Lithuanian Institute for Cultural Research with a thesis on “Count Władysław Tyszkiewicz and Western European Fine Arts in Nineteenth-Century Lithuanian Collections.” In 2016, she joined the Kazys Varnelis House-Museum (the National Museum of Lithuania), where she has been researching the collection, curating exhibitions and organising conferences. Aiste has published numerous articles and conducts guided tours through the museum. In 2021, she became a lecturer at Vilnius Academy of Arts.

27 April 2021

Renate Leggatt-Hofer (independent scholar, Vienna)
The Kunstkammer of Emperor Ferdinand I in Vienna: Kunstkammer Building (1558), Collection, Garden and Residential Architecture

Lecture of ca. 40 minutes followed by discussion

The lecture will focus on the imperial residence in Vienna, in particular on the purpose-built Habsburg Kunstkammer of 1558. As far as we know, it was the first time a dedicated building was designed to house the imperial collection. Positioned adjacent to the ballhouse in the Untere Lustgarten, it was part of the residential area but separated – an essential innovation –from the official ceremonial apartment within the Alte Burg. The connections between garden (nature), the collection in its separate building and the official ceremonial space will be analysed, as well as the terminology and meaning of “kunstkammer” and “kunsthaus” in the written sources.

What did the idea of having a separate museum in Vienna mean for the set-up of kunstkammern within the Habsburg Empire and across Europe, e.g. in Munich? After Ferdinand’s death in 1564 his son Maximilian II significantly enlarged the Viennese Kunstkammer building. In 1582, under Rudolf II, it was finally connected to the Old Castle by a bridge across the moat.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Vienna Kunstkammer was swallowed by new structures. Nevertheless, its exact position, appearance and building history were recently discovered: Between 2005 and2017, the imperial Hofburg, its building, meaning and functional history from the thirteenth century to the present time was the subject of an interdisciplinary research project of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Renate Leggatt-Hofer (until 2015 Holzschuh-Hofer) completed her degree in Art History, Archaeology and Philosophy at the University of Vienna in 1984 with a PhD on ecclesiastical architecture of the sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries. After post-doctoral fellowships at The Albertina Museum (Vienna) and at the Austrian Historical Institute (Rome), she participated in numerous research projects, e.g. on the pleasure palace Neugebäude, Vienna, and several exhibitions. From 1994 to 2016, Renate worked for the Federal Monuments Authority Austria (Bundesdenkmalamt) at the Research and Scientific Inventory Department; from 2010 to 2016, she served as the Head of the Executive Department for Public Relations. From 2005 to 2014, she took part in the research project on the Vienna Hofburg organised by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Renate currently works as an independent scholar. Her main research interests include architectural iconology, central European Renaissance architecture, early modern residences, early modern art collecting displayed in residential architecture and the semantic history of Burgundian symbolism.

Inaugural Event, 17 November 2020, 19.00 CET

Workshop: Issues of Provenance – Provenance as Issue

• Dr. Patrick Hunt, Stanford University, "Who Owns Priam’s Treasure?”
• Dr. iur. Avraham Weber, Weber & Co., “Contemporary International Thoughts as for the Importance of Provenance Research to Identification and Understanding of Nazi Looting”
• Dr. Andrzej Jakubowski, University of Opole, “What is Provenance Research? What Purpose does it Actually Serve?”