any of the interior photographs. It is clear, however, that Schnütgen could not have had stained glass installed in front of or in the few windows in his rather dark, non-electrified rooms without further reducing the already sparse daylight. In other collections, most notably the famous and exemplary collection of Frédéric Spitzer (1815–1890) in Paris,25 original stained glass served as the finishing touch in the design of modern ‘period rooms’, which the Khanenko couple in Kyiv, among others, also used as a reference when staging their own collection.26 Many of the newly established collections of stained glass in Cologne were sold shortly after they were assembled, as their owners found themselves in financial difficulties after the withdrawal of Napoleonic soldiers in 1814, and the secularised property came on the market a second time. In 1824, the important Pleunissen-Hirn-Schieffer collection of stained glass was auctioned off and scattered around the world.17 By this time, a professional art market had been established in Cologne. From the 1840s onwards, all major auctions of Cologne estates were held at the auction house of J. M. Heberle, which by then had acquired a monopoly on the art trade in the city.18 The auction of the art collection of Johann Anton Ramboux (1790–1866) in 1867 marked the first public appearance of the young, recently ordained Alexander Schnütgen as a buyer, who acquired several medieval paintings – the foundation of his collection.19 By the late 1860s, when Schnütgen discovered his passion for collecting medieval art, the period when stained glass was widely available in the Cologne art trade had long since passed. Looking at the stained glass that Schnütgen must have acquired between 1867 and the donation of his collection to the City of Cologne in 1906, it is striking that, apart from two very important round-arched windows from the mid-13th century depicting the Death of the Virgin (fig. 2) and the Coronation of the Virgin,20 it consists almost entirely of smaller cabinet panes and stained-glass fragments. The founder’s original collection included a remarkable number of medieval head fragments, which had been removed from the context of the narrative cycles of larger church windows and were probably easier and less expensive to acquire on the art market even in the last third of the 19th century. It is no secret that Schnütgen had other ways of acquiring stained glass apart from the publicly available sources of purchase. At the end of the 19th century, the trend towards the monuments of the past began in many places with the restoration and safeguarding of the buildings and their stained glass. The aim of restoration practice at that time was to achieve an overall impression that was harmonious and true to the original style, which led to massive interventions in the original substance. Schnütgen, who was commissioned to organise the work on the three windows of the central radiating chapel of Cologne Cathedral between 1899 and 1901, also acted in this spirit. At the slightest sign of damage, he had entire panes replaced with neo-Gothic copies, resulting in the loss of much original material. In keeping with his motto Colligite fragmenta ne pereant (Gather the remaining pieces so that they do not perish),21 he then added some of the discarded High Gothic glass paintings to his private collection, including the remarkable head of the younger king from the window of the Three Magi (fig. 3).22 The unusual stained-glass pasticcio, likely assembled at Schnütgen’s behest from fragments of heads and figures from the church of St. Maria Sion in Cologne (fig. 4),23 is not only a pictorial expression of his motto. It also clearly reflects his ambition to use his collection to represent a chronological and thematic development of medieval Christian art, which at the same time served as a teaching collection for contemporary neo-Gothic art production. This can be seen in the collector’s residence, documented in an impressive series of photographs taken by Emil Hermann in 1910 (fig. 5).24 The works, arranged according to material, form and theme, are closely packed together – no stained glass is visible in Fig. 3 Head of a king from the Three Magi Window in Cologne Cathedral, Cologne, c. 1330–1340 17 See note 12. Another collection of stained glass was owned by the Cologne cloth merchant Caspar Heinrich Bemberg (1744–1824); see Berghausen 1995, 151. For a list of the early Cologne collections containing stained glass alongside other objects, see Schuhmacher 1998, 112. 18 Kronenberg 1995, 132– 133. 19 For more on Schnütgen’s beginnings as an art collector, see Westermann-Angerhausen/Beer 2006, 4. 20 Cologne, Museum Schnütgen, inv. M 2, M 3. – Lymant 1982, 11–15, nos. 1, 2; Woelk/Beer 2018, 150–151, no. 96 (Moritz Woelk). 21 Westerann-Angerhausen 1993. 22 Cologne, Museum Schnütgen, inv. M 40. – For more on Schnütgen’s not uncontroversial involvement in these measures, see, among others, Cat. Himmelslicht 1998, 312–313, no. 82 (Claudia Schuhmacher). 23 Cologne, Museum Schnütgen, inv. M 6. – Lymant 1982, 19–21, no. 4. 24 For more on the staging of the Schnütgen Collection see Beer 2015 and Beer 2018. 25 Shepard 2019, 424. 26 See the essay by Anastasia Matselo in this volume and Welzel/Zeising 2022, 117–118. 26 27
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