Museums and Collections  

Museums and collections of the Universität Leipzig

More than teaching and research

The Universität Leipzig supports three museums and numerous collections, most of which are accessible to the general public.

The Egyptian Museum hosts the most important university collection of its kind in Germany, and the Museum for Musical Instruments’ collection is one of the largest in the world. The Botanical Garden is, with Padua and Sienna, the oldest in Europe. The University Art Collection (Kustodie) comprises European paintings, sculptures, works on paper as well as objects of the applied arts from the High Middle Ages into the present. In many ways, the collection reflects six hundred years in the history of Germany’s second oldest university.

University collections are distinguished by the fact that, in addition to the classic museum tasks of collecting, conserving, making the collections accessible and presenting them, they are also used for teaching and research, enabling students to handle the pieces as they learn about them. Despite the modern means of transferring knowledge using audiovisual methods, teaching, learning and researching using actual objects from collections should not be dismissed for many subject areas.

Museums and collections

• Egyptian Museum
• Museum of Classical Antiquities
• Botanical Garden
• Kustodie (Art Collection of the University)
• Geological-Paleontological Collection
• Anatomy Teaching Collection
• Pathology Teaching Collection
• History of Medicine Collection
• Mineralogical and Petrographic Collection
• Museum of Musical Instruments
• Prehistoric and Protohistoric Collection
• Special Collections of the University Library