Digitised Inventory Books

Cataloguing of the Museum Schnütgen’s holdings in inventory books began in 1924/25, only several years after the opening of the Museum in 1910 in an annexe attached to the Kunstgewerbemuseum (Museum of Applied Arts) in Cologne. The division of the inventory books according to separate artistic media, each designated by a different letter, follows the classification system of collections of applied arts that prevailed at the time.

The objects are recorded in the inventory books using consecutive numbers and not strictly chronologically according to the date of acquisition. Thus, on any given page, objects from Alexander Schnütgen’s collection (“Alter Bestand”) can be found alongside others that entered the museum’s collection only after its foundation, such as works from the donation of the museum’s first director, Fritz Witte (“Stiftung Witte”). Purchases, donations and other types of acquisitions are usually accompanied by a reference to the list of acquisitions (“Zugangsverzeichnis”), which documents individual acquisitions chronologically from 1911 onwards.

The dating and localisation of the objects in the inventory books and the list of acquisitions reflects the state of knowledge at the time of the entries and is in many cases outdated.

For reasons of data privacy, entries in the inventory books up to 1950 have been made accessible here.