Ashmolean Museum

The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archeology, in operation since 1683, is considered the world's first university museum. The most historically valuable objects in his collection include a collection of papyri (including the manuscripts of the Old and New Testaments), drawings by Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo Da Vinci, and a limestone plaque from the Sumerian city of Kish. Interesting items in the Ashmolean Museum collection include the “Posie rings” collection (wedding rings with rhyming inscriptions from the 17th and 18th centuries) and the attire belonging to Lawrence of Arabia.

The museum owes its name to Elias Ashmole (1617-1692) - a collector of ancient coins, books, copperplate engravings, zoological and geological specimens. Created by him and donated to the University of Oxford, a cabinet of curiosities (an extremely fashionable at that time form of collecting unusual specimens from very different fields of art and science) became the reason for establishing the Ashmolean Museum. The first headquarters of the facility, called Old Ashmolean (now the seat of the Museum of The History of Science), is the oldest existing building in the world, erected solely for museum purposes.

The Ashmolean Museum became a media sensation due to the audacious theft made on New Year's Eve 1999. The undetected perpetrators entered the museum building through a skylight on the roof to steal a painting by Paul Cézanne, Auvers-sur-Oise, worth nearly $ 5 million. No other painting or exhibit was lost, and the stolen work has not yet appeared at any auction.