Nikolaus Müller e le prime fotografie delle catacombe ebraiche di Venosa

Abstract

Nikolaus Müller and the First Photographs of the Jewish Catacombs of Venosa

In the Autumn of 1904, the German theologian and archaeologist Nikolaus Müller (1857-1912) had the opportunity to visit, for the third time, the Jewish catacombs of Venosa. During his prolonged stay in the town, he was able to take many photographs in the catacomb, and he did the same in various other sites in southern Italy where ancient Jewish epitaphs, to the best of his knowledge, were kept. After Müller’s sudden death, all this material, along with a number of photographs he had taken in this same period in Rome, was almost forgotten. The original glass plates re-emerged in Berlin only in the last decade of the 20^th century, and were promptly recovered and restored to the Humboldt-Univesität. Their discovery was announced by Peter Welten in a series of introductory articles and the photographs relating to the Jewish Catacombs of Monteverde in Rome were studied and published in 2013 in full in a volume edited by Daniela Rossi and Marzia Di Mento. The remaining images from southern Italy, not always easy to identify, remained, however, virtually unknown. This article presents a selection of the photographs taken by Müller in Venosa, the earliest-known photographic images of the site, and describes their relevance as points of comparison to the current condition of ancient epitaphs still in the site, most of which in the meantime have deteriorated greatly or are now missing or destroyed.