Stielau, Allison;
(2023)
The 1869 Regensburger Silberfund: A Seventeenth-Century Hoard of Silver.
Metropolitan Museum Journal
, 58
pp. 33-58.
10.1086/728876.
Preview |
Text
Stielau_The 1869 Regensburger Silberfund_VoR.pdf Download (9MB) | Preview |
Abstract
Two German drinking vessels in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection were found in Regensburg in 1869 as part of a cache of early modern artifacts that had been hidden in the seventeenth century (figs. 1, 2). If such a discovery were made today, its contents would most likely be kept together in a local institution, where interpretive emphasis would be placed on the treasure as a collection of objects with a precise context of concealment.1 However, the so-called Regensburger Silberfund came to light in an era less concerned with the hoard as a subject of archaeological analysis and with heavy financial pressures on objects to be sold or moved from their original findspots. Dispersed by the end of the nineteenth century, the trove is likely impossible to recover as a complete set of objects and, in some cases, individual artifacts have been severed from their association with the treasure.2 It was only later in the twentieth century, for example, that The Met’s two vessels acquired in 1911, a double cup now attributed to the Regensburg smith Simon Pissinger and the small tankard given to Abraham Riederer the Elder, of Augsburg, were linked back to the Silberfund, making them the only known survivors from an original group of twenty gilt-silver cups and tankards.3 While the Regensburg discovery is mentioned in recent catalogue entries on the two objects, the formal provenance information does not include this earlier history.4 Yet information about the vessels’ owners extending back through the nineteenth century to the home in which they were found, and perhaps even to some of the people who may have hidden them in the 1630s, is available.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | The 1869 Regensburger Silberfund: A Seventeenth-Century Hoard of Silver |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1086/728876 |
| Publisher version: | https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/7288... |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the version of record. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of History of Art |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10184542 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
