Ashmolean Museum

The Ashmolean Museum , located at Oxford (Great Britain), is the first university museum in the world, designed by the architect Charles Robert Cockerell.

History

The first building, located in Broad Street, is inaugurated the June 6th 1683, after five years of work, to shelter the collections given by Elias Ashmole to the Université of Oxford: ancient currencies, books, engravings, specimens geological and zoological, among which the empaillé body of the last dodo that Europe knew. The naturalist Robert Plot is its first director.

Thereafter, the collections change site and the site is used by the team of the Oxford English Dictionary. Since 1935, the building is a Musée of history of sciences. It accommodates in particular the scientific instruments given by Lewis Evans to the university of Oxford, among which the largest collection of Astrolabe S in the world. The current building of Ashmolean goes back to 1845. Located in Beaumont Street, it is the work of Charles Cockerell, which drew it in a neo-classic style.

Collections

The principal museum includes/understands the original donation of Elias Ashmole but also of vast archaeological and artistic collections. Thanks to a legacy of Sir Arthur Evans, the department of archology thus has a broad Minoan ceramics range and mycéniennes. The collections also include/understand:

the Marble of Paros, a chronological table discovered on the island of Paros;
of the drawings of Raphaël, Michel-Angel and Léonard de Vinci;
the funeral mask of Olivier Cromwell;
of the Watercolour S of Turner;
of the tables of Piero di Cosimo, John Constable, Claude Lorrain and Pablo Picasso;
of the Arab clothes of ceremony worn by Lawrence of Arabia.

External bonds

Site of Ashmolean

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