Opening hours:
Tuesday - Sunday: 10:00-18:00
Opening hours:
Tuesday - Sunday: 10:00-18:00
EXPLORE
Paintings have power, they can replace words and open up views into completely unknown worlds.
In a joint project with Maribor Art Gallery in 2020, we are launching a series of activities dedicated to the study of the creation of the first collections of paintings and the centenary of organised artistic activity in Maribor.
The exhibition of the Maribor Regional Museum entitled INVENTORY NUMBER 1 presents paintings that came into the museum collection as a result of the work of the predecessors of the present museum - the Museum Society in Maribor, the Historical Society for Slovene Styria and the Diocesan Museum.
In the past decades we were mainly interested in the object as a work of art and as a document of a particular artistic style, environment and period. However in the context of the project INVENTORY NUMBER 1 we have also taken an interest in the donor or the collector, who for certain reason donated or acquired the object for his or her own or the museum's collection. The material is closely linked to Maribor and its inhabitants, and to the spirit of reflection and national identity at the turn of the 20th century.
We are convinced that these stories can be appealing to modern-day museum visitors.
You are kindly invited to delve into our virtual exhibition!
Hans Adam Weissenkircher, Mary with St Nicholas, from Maribor Cathedral, late 17th century.
The Lavantine Diocesan Museum was founded in Maribor in 1896 to protect sculptures and paintings that had been removed from churches. The collection of the Lavantine Diocesan Museum has never been open to the public. It was kept in a ground-floor room of the old gymnasium on today's Mladinska Street. In 1914, in the magazine Lover of Christian Art, Augustin Stegenšek reported that the first objects began to arrive at the museum shortly after it was founded. By the First World War, a large number of sculptures, paintings, fabrics, manuscripts, documents, old books, novels and other objects had accumulated.
The museum did not have an inventory book. By 1914, 186 objects had been collected. Stegenšek's inventory of the most important ones, mentioned in the magazine article, is valuable. The most important paintings that can be identified in the collection are those by Hans Adam Weissenkircher (1615-1695), who was considered one of the most important Styrian painters of his time.
In the current inventory book, some of the paintings are recorded as having been brought into the museum collection from the Diocesan Museum, but they are not on Stegenšek's list. The more interesting art works are those that have a recorded provenance, but otherwise they are of lesser quality, mainly from the 18th century.
