African art enthusiasts generally associate the Vienna Museum fur Volkerkunde with its famous Benin collection and precious court dwarf figures (Fig.

African art enthusiasts generally associate the Vienna Museum fur Volkerkunde with its famous Benin collection and precious court dwarf figures (Fig. 1) (1) The collection gained international attention in the early 1990 after a traveling exhibition toured from first to last Europe and the United States. (2) However, fairly little is known about other parts of its Africa collection and its particular history.

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At ready the Africa collection of the Museum fur Volkerkunde comprises more than 35000 inventory numbers and can be characterized as a classic ethnographic collection with a vast typological array of artifacts, many of them appreciated today as works of art. The largest part of these holdings was assembled during the last quarter of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century; in a less degree than the Habsburg monarchy. Therefore, in addition to reflecting the unravelling and orientation of the discipline of Volkerkunde (ethnology) in Austria, the composition of the collection sheds light forward relations between the Austro-Hungarian empire and Africa during that period. The precedences and special fields of research of the curators in charge were other determining factors in shaping the collection.

It is impossible to not past nor future all the highlights of as it is a varied and complex collection; therefore, this article concentrates forward a selection of artworks characteristic of the collection's composition. The regional nerves reflected in this choice furthermore relate to decisive consequences in the building of the collection.

Although it did not interpret its doors to the general public until 1889 the Imperial Royal Museum of Natural History (KK Naturhistorisches Hofmuseum) was officially originateed in 1876. The initial plans already considered the installment of an anthropological-ethnographic department, paying tribute to a newly emerging field of studies. This department was created and initially headed by the agency of the first general director of the recently made known museum, Ferdinand von Hochstetter (1829-1884) who cultivated a personal interest in ethnographical topics. A geologist and mineralogist according to training, he had been a member of the scientific team onward the famous circumnavigation of the globe at the Austrian frigate Novara in 1857-1859 This major enterprise was aimed at multidisciplinary research in a Humboldtian vein and combined geopolitical with economic interests. (3) Hochstetter understood anthropology as the natural history of man, a science that also encompassed "ethnology" and studied all manifestations of the human mind determined according to its geographical-climatic conditions, a predisposition that his successor presently would turn into a culture-historical direction.

From 1877 forward Hochstetter employed Franz Heger (1853-1931) as his assistant. After his superior's untimely death in 1884 Heger took through the whole extent of the direction of the anthropological-ethnographic department. During the first forty years of the department's existence, Heger played a pivotal part in the development and posterior enlargement of the ethnographic collection. subject to his direction, the collection as a whole grew from fewer than 5000 goals at the outset in 1876 to more than 94000 in 1918 by dint of that time, the African collection numbered 21120 pieces.

In the first years, Heger and Hochstetter fortunately gathered pre-existing collections from various imperial holdings, creating the foundation of the nascent ethnographic collection. The greatest in quantity prominent pieces originated from the so-called Ambras Collection, the remnants of the art cabinet of Archduke Ferdinand II of Tyrol (1529-1595) originally housed at Ambras Castle near Innsbruck. This collection, integrated into the Natural History Museum's collection in 1880 is mainly known for its spectacular sixteenth hundred feather crown and other pre-Columbian feather works from Mexico, which equable today are often wrongly attributed as originally belonging to Montezuma (Anders 2001) However, an of the most precious artworks generally in the Africa collection were already listed in the inventory of the art cabinet dating to 1596: six delicately carved Bini-Portuguese spoon the same of the world's three surviving Sapi-Portuguese forks (Fig. 2; Bassani and Fagg 1988) a Sapi-Portuguese saltcellar (Fig. 3) and four oliphants in ivory (Plankensteiner 2000) (4)

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The first views from Africa to be catalogued by means of the anthropological-ethnographic department comprised more than 500 ethnographical specimens from what was then called Abyssinia and the Upper Nile region. These were brought to Austria according to Josef Natterer (1822-1862), a former Austro-Hungarian consul in Khartoum, and donated to the imperial Natural History Cabinet in 1865 The secondary registered collection resulted from Giovanni Miani's first exploration of the Upper Nile in 1860 Together with collections of Konstantin Reitz, Martin Hansal (Fig. 4) Ernst Marno, Ignaz Knoblecher, Wilhelm Junker Richard Buchta and especially those of Emin Pasha, alias Eduard Schnitzler (Fig. 5) they constituted the important Southern Sudan holdings, at the time regarded as precious scientific material for which the museum was internationally renowned in the late nineteenth hundred (Bahnson 1888). Consisting predominantly of artifacts intended for ceremonial or daily use, many of them are also distinguished by the agency of their high aesthetic value (Figs. 6-7)