Additionally, adjacent to Goethe House is Goethe Museum, which houses an extensive collection of art and artifacts related to Goethe and his era. If you’re interested in delving deeper into Goethe’s life and the cultural context of his time, a visit to both Goethe House and Goethe Museum is highly recommended.
The Romance Museum, one might guess, explores the general theme of Goethe’s life’s work further. Along with his contemporaries, it tracks the theme of romance through to the modern day.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe was born in 1749 in Frankfurt. Germany views him as a representative of Sturm and Drang (the pro romantic movement) and Classicism, but to the rest of Europe he is considered the most important German speaking proponent of Romanticism.
From his childhood on, the visual arts were also an important part of the poet’s life and here, too, his horizon was broad: For Goethe’s, the “sun-like” eye, seeing and beholding, were fundamental categories for apprehending the world, colour and light were objects of his scientific research. He was a draftsman and art collector, occupied himself – not least by traveling to Italy – with classical antiquity, the Renaissance, and Classicism and sought to influence contemporary art with the Weimarer Kunstfreunde (Weimar Friends of Art).
Since its founding in 1859 the Freies Deutschmark Hochstift has been collecting art. The painting collection was assembled with special reference to Goethe and his time and those concentrates on the period from the mid-18th to the mid-19th centuries. At the German Romantic Museum, the Goethe Gallery forms the transition between the house of Goether’s birth and the Romanticism exhibition. It traces the arc from the 18th-century works from the region of Frankfurt, as Goethe came to know in his parental home, up to the 19th century. It gathers, among others, works by the eccentric Swiss artist Henry Fuseli, portraits by Anton Graffiti, who gave the age a new face, views of Italy by Johann Philipp Hackert, and portraits by Angelica Kauffmann. Works by Caspar David Friedrich, Carl Gustav Carus, Carl Blechen, and Johan Christian Clasuen Dahl, painters of the Romantic period with whom Goethe was closely involved, can be seen in the painting cabinet in the Romanticism exhibition on the third floor.
The collection thus presents not only Goethe’s own preferences and knowledge of the art of his time, not only portraits of the poet and his lieu and paintings that deal with his work. Instead, it offers a concentrated view into 100 years of art history and shows the continuities and ruptures that characterized the arts at the birth of a new epoch around 1800 and thus at the beginning of the modern age.
Romance Museum, Frankfurt
Thus romanticism as a movement infuses the idea of romance in all its forms into various genres. It might be expressed in portraiture by way of particular lighting or paint strokes, or in religious icons or landscapes by combining religious themes with those sitting for the paining against a backdrop of antiquity. However, try to define romance and it takes a milleau of meaning. A stolen glance, a stolen kiss, something more? Speckled sunlight through the trees, a night at the opera, a glass of champagne, spangled starlight?
Romance is interpreted as many things and perhaps means something different to everyone. Much in the same way that poetry and art may all be interpreted differently, the Romance Museum may mean something unique to each of us. In fact, I’d be disappointed if it didn’t.
Good To Know
The ticket to Goethe House includes entry to the Romance Museum. Once you are finished exploring Goethe House, return to the entry hall and ticket desk. Take the rather inconspicuous looking stairway located up against the stone wall to discover the Romance Museum. Even if you don’t have time to explore the museum itself, at least take a look at the stairway, as it is rather spectacular.
Would I Return?
No.