The National Archaeological Museum of Athens possesses fourteen Greek fibulae of different sizes found during American excavations at Halae of Locris carried out between 1911 and 1914. They belong to the hinged fibula group, which is characterized by the distinctive decoration of its bows. Fibulae of this type have been found in the area of the Central Balkans, Romania, and northern and central Greece. Observable differences in the shapes of the decorative elements of these fibulae are of regional nature and allow several varieties to be identified within the type. The fibulae in question represent a local transformation of the northern models manifested mainly in the use of native Greek patterns particularly in the case of the palmettes decorating their hinge plates which are purely Greek in shape, and in the form of projections adorning their bows. The high artistic quality of the Halae fibulae reinforces the conviction of their Greek workmanship. They differ from each other in details, and this makes them very good examples of the development of the Greek variant of the hinged type fibula in the 5th century BC.
In the collection of the Archaeological Museum in Wrocław is a Greek fibula, which was donated by Wilhelm Grempler, a Wrocław doctor and researcher of antiquity well-known for his contribution to Silesian archaeology. It belongs to the ‘millwheel’ fibula group, which is characterised by the distinctive decoration of its bows. Fibulae of this type have been found in modern Bulgaria, Macedonia and northern and central Greece, although they seem not to have reached its south. Observable differences in the shapes of the decorative elements of these fibulae are of a regional nature and allow two varieties to be identified within the type: North Balkan and Greek. The best analogies for the Wrocław ‘millwheel’ fibula can be found in objects of the same type found at Halai in central Greece, which can be dated to the mid-5th century BC.
This paper considers the figure of the Wrocław collector Eduard Schaubert (1804–1860) and the collection he amassed during his twenty-year stay in Greece, paying particular attention to his collecting activities and the motives that lay behind them. The collection was built up over at least a dozen years and was gradually expanded in two ways: through personal exploration in Athens and in other regions of Greece, and through purchases. Schaubert’s collection forms an expression of its creator’s philhellenic attitudes and an example of a new, scholarly approach to collecting in which artefacts were chosen according to a pre-defined principle. It also represents an interesting example of a markedly heterogeneous group, comprising not only Greek objects but also items of Egyptian and Roman provenance, so forming what might be described as a typical nineteenth-century private collection of antiquities.
Among the collections of artefacts owned by German collectors and transferred to Polish museums after the Second World War, the set of objects created by Wrocław-based architect and antiquities collector Eduard Schaubert (1804– 1860) clearly stands out. The collection was created over the period of twenty years that he spent in Greece and was brought to Wrocław by Schaubert in 1850. After his death, in 1861, the objects, along with a collection of drawings and handwritten accounts documenting them, were partly sold and partly donated by his heirs to the Royal Museum of Art and Antiquity at the University of Wrocław (then the University of Breslau). The collection, which at the time it was handed over to the Wrocław museum numbered more than 300 objects, fits into the collecting culture of the era in which it was created, and Schaubert himself is a representative of the international community of philhellenic collectors dominating the landscape of European collecting in the first half of the 19th century. The vast majority of objects that were once in Schaubert’s collection have not survived to this day due to the Second World War and the post-war turmoil. These preserved are scattered in two museums today. The preliminary reading of the published inventory lists of the antiquities’ collection owned by Schaubert, prepared by August Rossbach who recorded the original state of the collected set, and a brief analysis of the preserved objects reveal the collection’s heterogeneity. Diversity was probably part of the original idea, from the moment Schaubert started his collection. It is also significant that the artefacts included in the collection were usually mass produced in series and either purchased or discovered privately, that is, acquired without precise archeological data. These are the main features that distinguish a typical philhellenic collection of antiquities, that is, a collection created from the philhellenes’ need to contact the ancient original as “touching the past” and to preserve the material remains of the glorified “cradle of art and knowledge” – ancient Greece.
In the collection of the University Museum of Wroclaw is a spherical faience aryballos of unknown provenance. It belongs to a group of vessels which enjoyed widespread popularity over a vast area of the Mediterranean in the 6th century BC. The analysis clearly shows that the spherical faience aryballos at the University Museum of Wroclaw should be classified within section 3 of V. Webb’s classification, that containing the most common and crudest type of faience aryballos. Aryballoi classified within this section were made, judging from their distribution, partly or mainly at Naukratis and they belong in date to the second part of the 6th century. It is likely that the Wroclaw aryballos is the product of an Egyptian workshop, perhaps of that located at Naukratis. An Eastern Greek workshop cannot be ruled out either.
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