Städtische Galerie Liebieghaus

Frankfurt's Museumsufer lines the Sachsenhausen bank of the River Main with museums, and the Städtische Galerie Liebieghaus numbers among them. The villa went up in 1896, designed by Leonhard Romeis. It began life as the retirement home of Baron Heinrich von Liebieg, a Bohemian textile manufacturer. The building blends historicist styles drawn from the baron's travels and from Franconian architecture.

Frankfurt bought the house in 1908 and turned it into a museum devoted to sculpture. Endowments and international purchases then built a collection of around 3,000 works spanning more than 5,000 years. Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome appear alongside medieval, Renaissance, Baroque and classicist works, with pieces from the Far East too. A marble discobolus, Carolingian ivory reliefs, an Ottonian crucifix and a Romanesque king's head from the Île-de-France number among the notable exhibits. Fragments of a Florentine tomb by Tino di Camaino, Hans Multscher's alabaster Trinity and Nikolaus Gerhaert's bust of Barbara von Ottenheim follow. A renovation completed in 2009 added an Open Depot in the basement and brought the exhibition space to 1,600 square metres. There, parts of the collection that never enter the permanent display go on view.

Outside, a garden displays sculptures of its own, among them a replica of Dannecker's Ariadne on the Panther. The banker Simon Moritz von Bethmann acquired the original in 1810, and it rests in the depot. Those grounds also set the scene for concerts and workshops, and the Liebieghaus Café serves coffee and cake afterwards.