Pre-Modern

The capital found in the Werden monastery district and reused as a building stone may have come from the cloister, where it crowned an ornamental column. It could also have belonged to a mullion. In the 11^th century, Werden was home to an organised construction hut, which produced building sculpture of high quality. There are style parallels with works from the Cologne area.

This thaler is one of the most valuable pieces in the coin collection and shows Mary, the most important patroness of the Essen Abbey, as a crowned queen of heaven on a crescent moon. Marian coins made of gold or silver were not only used as a means of payment, but also as amulets to protect against illness, accident and death in many countries and for centuries.

The task of the marksmen was to defend the city and its officials. They organised themselves into a religious brotherhood, the Sebastian Guild. The Essen Marksmen’s Guild is first mentioned in a city account from 1390. At the annual shooting match, the winner of the bird shooting received the King’s chain, to which he attached his house mark with initials and a year.

The ermine-trimmed cloak and the medals emphasise the Prince-Abbess’s origins in the high nobility and her claim to power. During her reign she founded the orphanage in Steele, for the operation of which she established a secular foundation that still exists today. The complex housed the orphanage, the residence of the Princess-Abbess and a mission station of the Jesuit order.

Wax portraits were popular among the bourgeoisie, since they could depict people to a deceptively real-looking degree. The portrayed Gottschalk Diedrich Baedeker acquired the city printing office in Dortmund in 1737, printed Dortmund’s first newspaper and married Clara Elisabeth Kaufmann from Essen.  The older son continued to run the business, the second married into the Wohlleben printing house in Essen and published the paper “Neueste Essendische Nachrichten” as well as school books.

The parchment booklet with full-page miniature pictures, elaborate borders with flowers and insects and handwritten entries by his humanist friends stems from the lost library of Dortmund scholar Caspar Schwartz. Books of hours were used for private prayer, but already had antiquarian value during the Renaissance. Schwartz was a Calvinist and was not allowed to hold municipal office.

The woman, who has not yet been identified, is dressed like a married, wealthy Cologne citizen at the end of the 16^th century. This is indicated by the sleeves lined with white fur, the richly decorated belt, the narrow piece of brocade fabric underneath and the rings. The noble elegance of her appearance, the prayer book, the skull and the introverted look indicate her god-fearing life.

Ladenspelder probably came from Essen and was known in Cologne as a copyist of Albrecht Dürer’s works. His subjects include religious, mythological and allegorical representations as well as copies of Italian tarot game cards. He signed many of his prints I.L.V.E.S. or IHVE. In this engraving he took up one of Dürer’s pictorial ideas, but changed the composition and thus brought more movement into the action.

A Kuttrolf, like this specimen made of milky-blue glass, is a bottle-like serving and drinking vessel with an artfully twisted, narrowed neck made of several tubes. Since it was hardly possible to drink from it without spilling, it also had a significance as a humorous drinking vessel for wine and brandy, in addition to its function as a drop dispenser for sprinkling rose water, for example.

The large horn, bent in a three-quarter circle, has been used since the 16^th century in northern Germany to signal during Bracken hunting. With packs of several hundred hounds, high European nobility organised the “Great Hunt” for red deer and wild boar. Even today, crescents are used by Sauerland Bracken hunters to wind six signals such as “gather” or “game dead”. 

The wide-brimmed morion with a high crest developed from the medieval iron hat, which was intended to absorb blows from cutting weapons such as swords, maces and halberds. The representative morion, which most likely belonged to a high-ranking commander rather than a foot soldier, is covered in a rich etched decoration of horsemen, foot fighters and countless weapon trophies and arabesques.

Representative rooms were heated with open fireplaces for a long time. A cast-iron plate protected the back wall from too much heat; at the same time, its reliefs decorated the fireplace of the house. The manufacturing centres of iron art casting were in the Eifel, in the Siegerland and in Hesse. In the 17^th century, coats of arms, allegories and ornaments such as volutes, fruit garlands and dolphins were mainly depicted.

In the 16^th century, cartography became the epitome of scientific exploration of the world. The oldest map of the county of Mark, which survives only in this original copy, provides a first insight into the topography of the later Ruhr area. It was a joint work of various cartographers and shows about 550 towns and villages in the colour-coded territories as well as the course of the Ruhr and its tributaries. 

The vessel excavated in Essen shows the allegories of the vices Superbia (vanity), Luxuria (unchastity) and Gula (intemperance). The depiction of the seven deadly sins of Christian moral teaching on objects of daily use was just as common in the early modern period as that of the virtues of faith, love and hope. The images were intended to remind their users of their human strengths and weaknesses.

When the enjoyment of tea, coffee and chocolate found its way into bourgeois culture in the 18^th century, new vessel forms were developed for their preparation and were also produced in silver. This teapot represents a shape common in Augsburg and Nuremberg. However, it was made in a silversmith’s shop in Essen, as evidenced by the sword as a city mark and the master’s mark.

The maroon, salt-glazed vessels decorated with ornate reliefs made Raeren stoneware a sought-after commodity throughout Europe. For the upper middle-class table, they were often decorated with mottoes and pewter attachments. Among the 50 or so master potters in Raeren, Jan Emens stands out in particular, who succeeded for the first time in producing grey stoneware with cobalt blue painting.