Five thousand years
Ancient Egypt to Neoclassicism in one house.
Photo: Andreas Praefcke — CC BY 3.0 · NorbertNagel — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Karsten Ratzke — CC0 · Photo: Andreas Praefcke — CC BY 3.0
Greek and Roman marble was brightly painted; centuries stripped it and left us the myth of pure white. The museum's lab reconstructs the pigments scientifically and shows replicas in original colour — blues, reds and golds that shock the modern eye and correct a whole history.
A supplement: the Städel for painting, this for sculpture, minutes apart. The ideal embankment day: Städel in the morning, lunch, then the Liebieghaus and its garden after — intensity, then intimacy.
The colour section genuinely amazes them ('statues were painted?!') and the garden gives release. It is a quiet house — right for children who can manage a composed hour, with a short Egypt section to hook them.
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The Liebieghaus is Frankfurt's home of sculpture: five thousand years of the figure — ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, through the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Baroque to Neoclassicism — inside an enchanting nineteenth-century villa with towers and garden on the museum embankment. Its strength is intimacy: major sculpture shown in the rooms of a house rather than the halls of an institution, so you approach the marble Athena, the painted wooden Madonnas and the baroque angels as a guest, not a visitor. The museum's famous polychromy lab has restored to ancient statues their startling original colours — a section that upends your idea of "white marble". Its garden is among the embankment's loveliest corners, the café among the statues a local secret. A quiet jewel fit to close the museum walk.
Ancient Egypt to Neoclassicism in one house.
Ancient statues in their startling original paint — the museum's famous science.
A turreted mini-palace with a statue garden — the setting itself a treasure.
Schaumainkai 71, 60596 Frankfurt