arthistoricum.net

The collection of engravings, which Alois Wilhelm Schreiber (1761–1841) established and sold to Heidelberg University in 1809 as a teaching collection, represents a highly interesting example of an early 19th-century university teaching collection, intended for the teaching of aesthetics and art history even before the subject of art history was institutionalised at Heidelberg University. The collection primarily comprises prints based on paintings by famous artists, which Schreiber classified according to the German, English, French, Italian and Dutch schools.

The original three-volume collection catalogue comprises approximately 950 entries and enables the reconstruction of the collection’s original composition. For reasons as yet unexplored, only a good third of the sheets in the surviving collection correspond to the catalogue entries.

As part of a project funded by the Kulturstiftung Baden-Württemberg, the “Schreiber Collection” is currently being conserved, digitised and subjected to scholarly analysis. The aim is to shed light on a scholar’s collection from the early 19th century, which was originally intended to serve as illustrative material for teaching art history.