Liebieghaus

The Liebieghaus is a late 19th-century villa in Frankfurt, Germany. It contains a sculpture museum, the Städtische Galerie Liebieghaus, which is part of the Museumsufer on the Sachsenhausen bank of the River Main.

The Liebieghaus.

Abbot Saint, unknown artist

Interior.

St Mary Magdalene, Hans Multscher

Dannecker's Ariadne on the Panther.

History

The Liebieghaus was built in 1896, in a palatial, Historicist style, as a retirement home for the Bohemian textile manufacturer Baron Heinrich von Liebieg (1839–1904). The city of Frankfurt acquired the building in 1908 and devoted it to the sculpture collection.^[1]

A renovation was completed in October 2009. This included adding a publicly accessible "Open Depot", making it possible for the first time to view certain parts of the collection that are not in the permanent exhibition.^[1]

Collection

The museum includes ancient Greek, Roman and Egyptian sculpture, as well as Medieval, Baroque, Renaissance and Classicist pieces, and works from the Far East.^[2][3] The collection was built up mostly through endowments and international purchases, and is universal in scope, with no particular link to the art or history of Frankfurt.

The building stands on the Schaumainkai, in a garden in which a number of sculptures are also on display, including a replica of Dannecker's Ariadne on the Panther. The original, which was acquired by the banker Simon Moritz von Bethmann in 1810, is currently in the depot.

Other major exhibits include:^[4][5]

• A marble discobolus
• A marble statue of Athena, a Roman copy of a Greek original by Myron
• Carolingian reliefs carved from ivory (mid-9th century)
• An Ottonian crucifix (mid-11th century)
• A Romanesque king's head from a statue from the Île-de-France
• Fragments from a Florentine tomb by Tino di Camaino (probably after 1318)
• An alabaster sculpture of the Trinity by Hans Multscher (c.1430)
• A Woman of the Apocalypse by Tilman Riemenschneider
• The Rimini Altar, an alabaster calvary from northern France (c.1430)
• A late-Gothic/early-Renaissance bust of Bärbel von Ottenheim, the mistress of Jakob von Lichtenberg (the Vogt of Strasbourg), by Nikolaus Gerhaert (1463–64).

Exhibitions (temporary)

• 2012: From June 20 to September 23, 2012, Jeff Koons. The Sculptor (at the Liebieghaus)
• 2011/12: From October 27, 2011 to March 4, 2012, Niclaus Gerhaert. The Medieval Sculptor

Further reading

• Wolf-Christian Setzepfandt: Architekturführer Frankfurt am Main. Third edition. Dietrich Reimer, Berlin, 2002. ISBN 3-496-01236-6. (German)
• Vinzenz Brinkmann, Maraike Bückling, Stefan Roller: Meisterwerke im Liebieghaus. Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung. Petersberg, Imhof, 2008. ISBN 978-3-86568-364-9. (German)

External links

• Home page in English
• Die neue Antike: una visita alle sale di scultura classica della Liebieghaus di Francoforte Anna Anguissola, LARTTE, 30 October 2009. (Italian)

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Notes

This article incorporates information from this version of the equivalent article on the German Wikipedia.

Coordinates: 50°06′07″N 8°40′18″E / 50.10194°N 8.67167°E / 50.10194; 8.67167