A nineteenth-century glyptic collection in the National Museum in Krakow

2014 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-96
Author(s):  
Paweł Gołyźniak ◽  
Lucyna Natkaniec-Nowak ◽  
Magdalena Dumańska-Słowik
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Museum

Scottish Nationality in the Nineteenth Century

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
James J. Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Gallery ◽  
National Museum ◽  
Focal Points ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
National Institutions ◽  
National Monuments ◽  
National Architecture

Measured in terms of the symbols of nationality common across the rest of nineteenth-century Europe, there can be no doubt that the Scots held an assertive sense of themselves as a distinct nation. Rather than giving up their nationality in favour of British-national institutions, the Scots surrounded themselves with all the signs and symbols of a culturally and historically coherent nation. The Scots had a national museum and national gallery, national monuments, a national poet, national dress and national architecture, as well as a pantheon of national heroes, past and present. Indeed, Scotland in the nineteenth century suffered not so much from a lack of focal points for its nationality than from a surfeit. In the Victorian era there existed a collective pride bordering on collective egotism, an imperial arrogance bound up with landscape, industry, education and Presbyterianism.

Creating a Community

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niall Sharples
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Family Member ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Field Work ◽  
Late Bronze Age ◽  
National Museum ◽  
Metal Detector ◽  
Direct Relevance ◽  
Television Programme

In the summer of 1979, when I was working on my undergraduate dissertation in the National Museum, I became involved in an interesting piece of field-work that has direct relevance to the material that we are going to examine in this chapter. A Mrs MacDonald came into the museum to enquire whether some objects she had in her possession were of any archaeological significance. She had been encouraged to make this visit by a recent television programme where the presenter discussed and exhibited objects that were similar to those in her possession. She explained to the curator that the objects had been found by a family member during ploughing and had been kept in the kitchen drawer for the last two decades, though they were often brought out for the children to play with. She then removed, from her shopping bag, a gold bracelet and a gold ‘dress fastener’ of distinctive Late Bronze Age type. This had the immediate effect of rendering the museum curator speechless—these were in the days before metal detecting had become a popular hobby, and new finds of this significance were seldom made. The most recent discovery of comparable objects was in the nineteenth century. Further discussion of the nature of the discovery revealed that the location of the find was still remembered; it was just behind the farmhouse. It was also thought that other objects were discovered at the time, but these were discarded, as they were not so interesting. As there was a possibility that objects were still present in the field it was decided that a team would be sent by the museum to explore the finds location. I was dispatched, with two other students then working in the museum, and a metal detector, purchased specially for the occasion, to see what we could find. I have to say that metal detecting must be one of the most boring pastimes ever invented. In our youthful enthusiasm, we decided to be thorough and systematic. We set out a grid that covered the area where the gold had been discovered and began work.

Barbarism Begins at Home: Islamic Art on Display in Palermo's Museo Nazionale and Sicilian Ethnography at the 1891‐92 Esposizione Nazionale

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-117
Author(s):  
Dana Katz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Regional Differences ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The Other ◽  
National Museum ◽  
Islamic Art ◽  
North African ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
At Home

Abstract In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Palermo's Museo Nazionale (National Museum) displayed one of the earliest institutional collections of Islamic art in Western Europe. The museum's director, Antonino Salinas, exhibited objects demonstrating the island's material heritage, including its two-and-a-half centuries of rule by North African dynasties during the medieval period. The prevailing perception elsewhere in post-unification Italy ‐ that Sicily was ungovernable and barbaric in nature ‐ heightened the display's significance. Another exhibition that many Italians would have perceived as representing the 'other' was the Mostra Etnografica Siciliana (Sicilian Ethnographic Exhibition), which the folklorist Giuseppe Pitrè created for the 1891‐92 Palermo Esposizione Nazionale (National Exposition). Highlighting Sicily's volatile image, the Italian press implicitly equated Pitrè's show with the so-called Abyssinian Village, which stood in the exposition fairgrounds and marked the establishment of Italy's first colony in Eritrea at a time of unprecedented imperial expansion. At the National Museum, Salinas remained undeterred, and despite associations of the island's conditions with Africa, he expanded its Islamic holdings. Likewise, Pitrè exhibited costumes, tools, and devotional objects that further accentuated regional differences at the National Exposition. In both displays, Salinas and Pitrè presented what they conceived as Sicily's unique cultural and historical patrimony.

Evolutionism and Positivism (c. 1860–1900)

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margarita Diaz-Andreu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Theory ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Museum ◽  
Evolutionary Theories ◽  
Culture History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Remote Past

This was the way that one of the executive members of the Swiss National Museum phrased, at the end of the nineteenth century, the changes that had taken place in the previous decades: the interest in the national past was replacing the former emphasis on the Great Civilizations. Another transformation that had occurred was that the study of prehistory, rather than the history of the Roman and medieval periods, was definitively on the agenda. This change of emphasis, which took place between the 1860s and 1880s, had been in motion throughout the century but had finally crystallized in the last two decades of the century. By then, nationalism had transformed its character into a predominantly conservative doctrine. Another adjustment was also apparent. The acceptance of evolutionism had emerged as a major scientific theory to explain change. Issues of nationalism, regionalism, and imperialism became intertwined with scientific theory and further nourished the interest in the remote past. The development of methods to study evolution in the natural sciences promoted a scientific approach to the prehistoric period. At the same time, this affected attitudes towards the Roman and the medieval past. In this chapter, therefore, I reject the view expressed by other historians of archaeology such as Trigger (1989: 148) and to a certain degree Sklenár (1983: 123–6), who think that nationalism constituted a threat to cultural evolutionism and its eventual dismissal. This, they think, took place when scholars moved towards the adoption of the culture-historical perspective in the first decades of the twentieth century. The following pages will reveal, however, that the belief in evolutionism was not contrary to the nationalist cause. Late nineteenth-century archaeologists believed in the evolutionary theories to a greater or lesser extent. Despite this, they also became deeply implicated in the construction of their national past, to a degree not seen in previous decades. Culture-history did not oppose evolutionism; it accepted its tenets and moved beyond them.

Double axe testimonies

Antiquity ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 48 (191) ◽  
pp. 206-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Hawkes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Museum ◽  
The West

It is useful to know that Joanna Close-Brooks, at Edinburgh in the National Museum of Antiquities, has found its only bronze double axe to be not from Co. Antrim, Ireland, but a nineteenth-century acquisition from Attica, Greece. Her information rightly opens the review of the claims for such axes in the West, by Stephen Briggs in ANTIQUITY last December (Briggs, 1973). Those in our museums with no such Aegean provenance he makes now five, since Anthony Harding informed him that in the British Museum's Card-catalogue (formerly British Association's) another is drawn and recorded as kept–at least in the 1920s—in the Farnham, Dorset (Pitt Rivers) Museum, without a provenance at all.

scholarly journals DEPICTING THE INVISIBLE: WELWITSCH'S MAP OF TRAVELLERS IN AFRICA

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
SARA ALBUQUERQUE ◽  
SILVIA FIGUEIRÔA
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
National Museum ◽  
African Continent ◽  
Historical Document ◽  
Historia Natural ◽  
Scientific Networks ◽  
Different Parts ◽  
The Invisible

ABSTRACT This paper addresses a nineteenth century African manuscript map which has hitherto remained ‘invisible’. This manuscript was produced by Friedrich Welwitsch (1806–1872), an Austrian botanist in the service of the Portuguese government, and held by the National Museum of Natural History and Science, University of Lisbon Museums/Museu Nacional de História Natural e da Ciência, Museus da Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal (MUHNAC). This historical document contains names of several travellers, many of them ‘invisible’ explorers, located in different parts of the African continent, depicting the relationships in both a visual and geographical way with notes and relevant historical observations. Welwitsch, as so many contemporary fellow botanists, was in contact with many scientists, exchanging not only correspondence but knowledge and collections. This map is a key document, a true hub of Welwitsch's network of knowledge in which the scientific networks, the types of actors, interactions, methodologies and practices of botany are revealed, providing insights into the botanical exchanges that contributed to the making of Welwitsch's African collections.

Monstrous Births

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nora E. Jaffary
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Museum ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Reproductive Anatomy ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter uses eighteenth- and nineteenth-century news publications, medical periodicals, and an 1895 catalogue of birth anomalies from Mexico’s National Museum of History to study evolving ideas about birth monstrosity. In the late colonial period, Mexicans understood anomalous births as evidence of New Spain’s prodigious fertility, a perspective that reflected both the particularized manner in which the Enlightenment developed in Mexico and the late colonial development of “creole patriotism”. Nineteenth-century reports of monstrous births revealed some changes. The later notices conveyed popular attitudes of revulsion and horror toward birth monsters. Second, whereas the late colonial notices restricted speculation as to the origins of unusual infants to “the rare effects of nature,” by the late nineteenth century, scientists and physicians, particularly obstetrician Juan María Rodrígez, turned their focus directly onto (and into) the bodies of the mothers who had produced such phenomena. They increasingly monitored the biological conditions of aberrant embryos’ development in the female uterus. This view allowed for the possible biological regeneration of monstrous productions but also contributed to the construction of the inherent pathology of Mexican women’s reproductive anatomy.

scholarly journals Erard Harps in the Collection of the Czech Museum of Music

Musicalia ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 85-114
Author(s):  
Daniela Kotašová
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Musical Instruments ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Success ◽  
National Museum ◽  
Instrument Maker ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Abstract The present harp collection of the National Museum – Czech Museum of Music contains Erard pedal harps from various periods of that famed Parisian company’s activity. In creating musical instruments, Sébastian Erard built upon the work of G. Cousineau and C. Groll and became the most successful manufacturer of double-action pedal harps with a fourchette (fork) mechanism (mécanique à fourchettes et à double mouvement). Erard’s work as an instrument maker influenced not only the historical development of the harp, but also the work of other instrument makers. In Bohemia, the Czech harp maker Alois Červenka (1858–1938) built upon Erard’s work with great success. The Erard harps in the collection of the Czech Museum of Music document the Czech socio-cultural context in which the harps of the French instrument maker were used from the late nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth.

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