Collection of Antiquities has been helping build identities of virtus and sapientia of the aristocracy and bourgeois elites in central Europe of the 16^th century, especially in the communes of Upper Italy and the Free Cities; the antiquitates are understood as worldly power, as a distinction of status and as an expression of knowledge of the owner on the past of the city or region. The antiquities can be considered as a proof for the old age of the aristocratic families and cities that could sometimes reach back until the Roman Empire. The Collection of Antiquities of the Counts of Manderscheid-Blankenheim in the residences Blankenheim and Jünkerath was the largest collection of Roman antiquitates of the end of the 16^th as well as the 17^th and 18^th century in the Rhineland.

The collection that was established by the humanistically educated Count Hermann von Manderscheid (1535-1604) was made up of ground finding of the surroundings of Cologne and Bonn as well as monuments of Jülich and the Eifel. The collection had to be abandoned to a large part when Countess Augusta Leopoldine of Manderscheid-Blankenheim and her husband the Bohemian Count Philipp Christian of Sternberg (1732-1811) had to fleet from troops of the French Republic and eventually relocated to Prag. The stone monuments that remained in the Eifel partly became property of the Cologne collector and intellectual Franz Ferdinand Wallraff (1750-1819) by a transfer document signed by their oldest son Franz Joseph Sternberg-Manderscheid; another part could be acquired by the Art Collection Bonn.  The aim of the interdisciplinary projects is to compile a comprehensive edition of the exceptional objects of the collection Blankenheim by using not only the still preserved antiquities of the Rhenish provinces but also handwritten sources and to create a translation and transcription of the Latin sources.

The concept of the collection and its presentation is to be presented in detail and to be considered in the context of other antiquity collections of the same time. Thus, important aspect of regional antiquity reception, which is often neglected by the Archaeology of the Roman Provinces, is investigated. The Open Access database of the project will be incorporated into the central object database Arachne of the German Archaeological Institute and the Archaeological Institute of the University of Cologne and will be made accessible to the LVR-Amt of Bodendenkmalpflege in Bonn. A large publication is in preparation.

Responsible: Norbert Hanel, Michael Heinzelmann, Jürgen Kunow, Peter Noelke

Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)