Museum of Archeology of the University of Pavia
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Museo di Archeologia dell'Università degli Studi di Pavia | |
 Palazzo Centrale which hosts the Museum of Archeology | |
 | |
| Established | 1819 |
|---|---|
| Location | Palazzo Centrale, Via Strada Nuova 65, Pavia, Italy |
| Coordinates | 45°11′13″N 9°09′26″E / 45.1870°N 9.1572°E |
| Type | Archeological museum |
| Owner | University of Pavia |
| Public transit access | Pavia railway station |
| Website | archeologia |
The Museum of Archeology of the University of Pavia was established in 1819 and is, together with that of Padua, one of the oldest in Italy. The museum is located inside the ancient San Matteo hospital in Pavia.
In 1818 Pier Vittorio Aldini participated in the competition for the first chair of Archeology at the University of Pavia, the oldest in Italy, won the post the following year he took up service. The Museum of Archeology of the University of Pavia was born with the name of "Numismatic and antiquarian cabinet" on the initiative of Pier Vittorio Aldini, as an integral part of the Institute of Archeology founded in 1819, one of the oldest, together with that of Padua, in Italy. The predominantly didactic purpose of the collection, initially fueled by a prudent purchasing policy and conceived as a field of practical exercises in archeology and classical art history, gives the reason for its non-specialist character, but articulated on a great variety of materials, distributed over a very extended chronological span (from the 2nd millennium BC to late antiquity).[1]
The series of marble sculptures largely dates back to Aldini's acquisitions, including the most valuable piece in the collection, the splendid female head, a Roman replica of the Aphrodite Sosadra of Calamis.[2] Also in the same collection a group of Roman marble statues from Velleia was enriched.[3][4] Of remarkable quality is a private female portrait of the imperial age assigned to the second half of the 2nd century AD. Interesting for the history of the circulation of forgeries in the antiquarian trade is the presence of some pieces of modern execution, including an eighteenth-century copy of a portrait in the National Museum of Naples, long considered to be a Hellenistic original.
The original nucleus of the collection also includes architectural elements, epigraphs (including two inscriptions on bronze lamina with medical prescriptions found at Vernavola[5]) and objects belonging to different classes of artefacts (ceramics, glass, metal objects, gems and rings), acquired, also locally, with the aim of offering students an effective sampling of the material culture of antiquity, understood in the modern way as a source for ancient history. The small bronzes are represented by a series of statuettes of divinities from different cultural areas (Egypt, Magna Graecia, Etruria, the Roman world): alongside types derived from the great statuary of classical Greece, typically Roman figures are represented, such as the statuettes of Lares, expression of the domestic cult. From the purchase in 1831 of the collection of the Milanese sculptor Giovanni Battista Comolli come a series of painted vases of Apulian production (4th century BC) and a small group of black-glazed Ware pottery attributable to Etruscan and southern Italic factories. In 1845 there was already a small collection of Egyptian and oriental material.[6]
Among Aldini's merits we should mention the acquisition of one of the major numismatics formed in Pavia between the 17th and 18th centuries, that of the Bellisomi marquises, exponents of the Pavia aristocracy open to antiquarian and Enlightenment culture. A significant increase in the materials of the university museum occurred later, in the 1930s, with the acquisition of a series of Etruscan figurative terracottas, donated by Pope Pius XI. In 1933 the museum received from the Superintendency of Antiquities of Naples a set of bronze pottery and a small group of architectural terracottas from Pompeii. In 1940 Carlo Albizzati bought for the Museum, with other materials, two interesting examples of pottery from the end of the 4th century BC: an overpainted Volterra crater and a red-figured hydra from Campania. One of the most recent donations, in the 1970s (a group of ceramic specimens from Arezzo), is due to Arturo Stenico.[7] An important fifteenth-century marble statue depicting a holy bishop (perhaps St. Augustine), formerly located in the Leano courtyard of the University, is currently conserved in the space of the museum.
