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Located outside of the museum is the gravestone of Maria Sophia Bawyr von Frankenberg (1667-1737). It reads:

“To God, the Best and Greatest.
The most reverend and most excellent Lady, Lady Maria Sophia de Bawer, Countess of Frankenberg, confirmed and blessed abbess of the illustrious collegiate church of St Cäcilia, Lady of Rondorf etc., enrolled in the most august Order of the Ladies of the Starry Cross. After increasing divine worship, completing the abbess’s building works, and restoring the church of St Maternus, she died in the year of Christ 1737, aged 70, after 52 years in religion and 24 years in the dignity of abbess. Rest in peace”

I often take photos of gravestones, as I don’t get out much, to try and understand something about who they commemorate. Usually when I’m overseas it’s something of a forlorn exercise as I can’t work out anything about them. But, this is a little different as she has her own Wikipedia page, albeit only in Germany.

A countess by birth and abbess of the collegiate church of St Cäcilien in Cologne (which is where this museum now is), she was also Lady of Rondorf and a member of the Order of the Starry Cross. She sounds quite decadent and rich…. She came from a large family, she had five siblings and five half-siblings, with two of her full siblings being military generals, which must help in feeling more safe and secure in life.

Her memorial inscription makes clear that she took her responsibilities seriously and it credits her with increasing divine worship, completing abbey building works and restoring the church of St Maternus (which still exists), which is a fairly respectable administrative record for anyone. The stone has become a little smashed up over time, but it has been repaired although perhaps the museum could put a little information panel by it.

I’ve used AI in the past to try and add colour to usually wooden statues which have limited evidence of their past polychrome look. It often makes it look colourful and that is in keeping with what I’ve seen in wider imagery.

This screen in the museum shows the evolution of how the figures in their collection were painted. This shows a much more pure and white look back in the medieval period towards more colour recently, although goodness knows what happened between 1893 and 1895.

This is an under-stated little number, it’s a bell which happens to be one of the oldest surviving in any German speaking country. It’s thought to date from around the early part of the ninth century and it’s made from three pieces of forged iron which have been smoothed and then riveted together.

The bell is nicknamed ‘Saufang’ which means ‘pig’s catch’ as it is rumoured that it got buried in a nearby pond and was discovered by a pig. As with many of these rumours, it’s likely made up, but it’s a nice story.

However, what I think is the most exciting thing about this bell is that it is from this church (what was then the Convent of St Cecilia which was founded in 888), or at least, the religious building that was here before. It left the church in the nineteenth century, but now the building is used as a museum it has made its way back here indirectly. I very much like this circle of history and there’s no better place for the bell to be today.

This felt mildly unsettling when walking by it, namely a skull tucked away in the stonework. According to the museum display, this may originally have formed part of a cell like hermitage. This would have been the home of an anchoress, a female enclosed beside a church in order to renounce the world in a very literal and rather committed way. She would have lived for years in what was usually a single stone room attached to the side of the church, with the shuttered slit allowing her to receive communion and be able to be involved with services. I don’t think I’d like this, it would play havoc with my travel plans.

The information panel notes that these recluses were normally higher ranking people (as someone who have to be paid to bring them food), and that as many as fourteen such cells are documented in Cologne between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.

It was only discovered in 1976 and the skull is likely not linked to the hermitage, this dates to the seventeenth century when the area was reworked to be a burial vault for the Augustinian canonesses who were operating the church.

This is one of my more irrelevant posts, although sometimes I wonder if any are actually relevant, but it’s an abandoned car park in Cologne. I wasn’t brave enough to explore it as I’m hardly going to be an urban explorer, but I like how quickly nature can take over.

It’s located on Deutz-Mülheimer Strasse and I’m pleased to say that they have closed the entrance from the road off as we all know someone who would otherwise drive down it….

Without verging too much into the political, the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in Cologne is clearly trying to do something serious and in very many ways admirable. It does not want to be an old ethnographic museum that simply places objects in cases and invites visitors to gawp at them as though the wider history of colonialism, collecting and cultural power were of no consequence. That instinct is sensible, and probably necessary. There is a genuine effort to reinterpret the collection, to question how objects arrived in Europe, and to push visitors into thinking about who gets to tell these stories. On paper, that is all rather noble. In practice though the museum perhaps sometimes feels so anxious about the moral framing that it risks becoming slightly stiff and over-managed, as though it no longer quite trusts the objects to speak for themselves.

For all the language of reinterpretation, there remain plenty of fairly conventional displays of artefacts in cases in the first few rooms, presented in a manner that would not have seemed wildly unfamiliar in a much older museum. That in itself is not a problem and is no doubt deliberate as part of the story that they wish to tell about the evolution of the museum.

The collection is interesting, although the display labels are not very clear visually, and there is nothing shameful about displaying it properly and giving people the information they came for. But the curatorial voice often seems oddly nervous, almost apologetic, as if the museum is worried that straightforward engagement with the material might be morally suspect unless heavily supervised. The result is perhaps a slightly sub-optimal arrangement in which the institution appears, at moments, to be more comfortable critiquing the existence of its collection than actually helping visitors understand it in a direct and human way.

Museums do not need to pretend that difficult histories are not difficult, but nor do they perhaps need to turn every gallery into a little seminar in correct opinion. At times it feels less like a place eager to share knowledge and more like one slightly embarrassed by its own holdings.