Ikonen-Museum der Stadt Frankfurt

At the eastern end of the Museumsufer in Frankfurt am Main is the Ikonen-Museum (also Ikonenmuseum Stiftung Dr. Schmidt-Voigt). It is housed in the Baroque rooms of the Deutschordenshaus directly at the Alte Brücke, the eastern terminus of the Museumsufer, and is affiliated with the Museum Angewandte Kunst. The institution is run by the City of Frankfurt am Main.

The basis of the collection was a 1988 donation of 800 icons, made on the condition that the city provide premises in which parts of the collection and exhibitions on the icon tradition of the Orthodox churches could be shown. For this purpose the refectory in the historic building was internally remodeled; thus the house found its place on the Museumsufer in 1990. The work on the building fabric ties in with an earlier reconstruction of the Deutschordenshaus and respectfully combines old and new through a clear separation of the structural elements.

The holdings, originally dating from the 16th to the 19th centuries, were expanded through purchases, loans and further donations to more than 1,000 objects. In 1999 the museum received, as a permanent loan, 82 post-Byzantine icons from the collection of the Museum für Byzantinische Kunst in Berlin. Particularly notable is a private loan comprising Ethiopian icons, crosses, manuscripts and liturgical instruments.

After roughly 30 years, the exhibition architecture was comprehensively redesigned in 2020/2021. By incorporating the foyer the exhibition space was enlarged; the foyer now functions as the spatial and thematic entrance. There the origins, dissemination, as well as the materiality and visual language of icons are explained. The main hall focuses on the appearance of the icon in the ecclesiastical context, while the gallery is devoted to its role in the domestic sphere. The redesign transformed the previously neutral presentation into an atmospheric space that also serves as a place of learning about the religious and cultural significance of the icons. The Ethiopia cabinet represents the only public presentation to date on the Orthodox Christianity of Ethiopian and Eritrean communities in Germany.