The Liebieghaus in Frankfurt Shows "Niclaus Gerhaert: The Medieval Sculptor”

Written by Thomas Friedrich Wednesday, 26 October 2011 23:07

Frankfurt, Germany  -  The Liebieghaus is proud to present "Niclaus Gerhaert: The Medieval Sculptor” from October 27th through March 4th 2012. Organised in cooperation with the Musée de l’Œuvre Notre-Dame in Strasbourg, the Liebieghaus is staging the first major special exhibition on Niclaus Gerhaert von Leyden (ca. 1430–1473), one of the most important and influential sculptors of the Late Gothic period. The Frankfurt presentation will showcase approximately seventy impressive works from such internationally renowned collections as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Bode-Museum in Berlin, and the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Munich.

An artist active in Strasbourg and Vienna, the Netherlander Niclaus Gerhaert von Leyden is undoubtedly one of the most important artists of the Late Gothic period. Although virtually unknown today, Gerhaert was highly praised by his contemporaries, who appreciated him above all for the lifelike quality of his objects, their formal originality and masterful execution. Emperor Friedrich II was also deeply impressed by Gerhaert and took the sculptor into his service. For the emperor’s monumental tomb in the Viennese Cathedral of St Stephen, the largest such tomb of the Middle Ages, Gerhaert executed the slab in red marble with a figure of the deceased – a masterwork of Late Medieval sculpture. The so-called Bärbel von Ottenheim – the head of a sibyl (an ancient oracle) sculpted in red sandstone – is among the chief objects in the Liebieghaus’s Medieval collection. Its companion piece, a bearded prophet of which likewise only the head has survived, is in the holdings of the Musée de l’Œuvre Notre-Dame in Strasbourg. The two sculptures were executed by Niclaus Gerhaert in 1463 to decorate the portal of the “Neue Kanzlei” in Strasbourg, a chancellery which has since been destroyed. For the first time since their separation in the nineteenth century, these two grandiose heads will be on view together again in the exhibition.

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 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. 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. The museum includes ancient Greek, Roman and Egyptian sculpture, as well as Medieval, Baroque, Renaissance and Classicist pieces, and works from the Far East. 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, a marble discobolus, a marble statue of Athena, 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) and 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). Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.liebieghaus.de

---

Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~