Wednesday 13 April 2016

veranstaltungsraum oder moments at the museum

Last week, I chanced upon the Heimat- (homeland is not really an equivalent phrase—attachment or identity, perhaps) and Industrial-Historical Museum of the Wiesbadner borough of Biebrich and went in for a look.
The formerly independent town on the shores of the Rhein is still an important manufacturing centre in the region, but the focus of the permanent collection mostly had the focus and reach back to the eighteenth century and the creation of the Duchy of Orange-Nassau with a lot of interesting ephemera of the age and spiky hats. One of the more interesting pieces on display was a chest (eine Truhe) with its complicated, artful locking mechanism revealed.
There was also a special exhibit of the works of native painter and relative unknown Friedrich Carl Scheidemantel with many pictures in the Rheinromanik genre, contemplative idylls and castle ruins cast against dramatic skies, and also many, like the ensemble here pictured, of the cartoon-medieval that depicted the expedition (again with a healthy dose of license and anachronism) of Otto the Great to the fields of Lombardy, which helped him consolidate power and assert himself Holy and Roman Emperor of the Germans.