Frankfurt
Frankfurt is a metropolis and the largest city of the German federal state of Hesse, its 746,878 inhabitants make it the fifth-largest city of Germany after Berlin, Hamburg and Cologne. On the River Main, it forms a continuous conurbation with the neighbouring city of Offenbach am Main, its urban area has a population of 2.3 million. The city is at the centre of the larger Rhine-Main Metropolitan Region, which has a population of 5.5 million and is Germany's second-largest metropolitan region after the Rhine-Ruhr Region. Since the enlargement of the European Union in 2013, the geographic centre of the EU is about 40 km to the east of Frankfurt's central business district. Like France and Franconia, the city is named after the Franks. Frankfurt is the largest city in the Rhine Franconian dialect area. Frankfurt was a city state, the Free City of Frankfurt, for nearly five centuries, was one of the most important cities of the Holy Roman Empire, as a site of imperial coronations, it has been part of the federal state of Hesse since 1945.
A quarter of the population are foreign nationals, including many expatriates. Frankfurt is an alpha world city and a global hub for commerce, education and transportation, it is the site of many European corporate headquarters. Frankfurt Airport is among the world's busiest. Frankfurt is the major financial centre of the European continent, with the headquarters of the European Central Bank, Deutsche Bundesbank, Frankfurt Stock Exchange, Deutsche Bank, DZ Bank, KfW, several cloud and fintech startups and other institutes. Automotive and research, consulting and creative industries complement the economic base. Frankfurt's DE-CIX is the world's largest internet exchange point. Messe Frankfurt is one of the world's largest trade fairs. Major fairs include the Frankfurt Motor Show, the world's largest motor show, the Music Fair, the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world's largest book fair. Frankfurt is home to influential educational institutions, including the Goethe University, the UAS, the FUMPA, graduate schools like the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management.
Its renowned cultural venues include the concert hall Alte Oper, Europe's largest English theatre and many museums. Frankfurt's skyline is shaped by some of Europe's tallest skyscrapers; the city is characterised by various green areas and parks, including the central Wallanlagen, the City Forest and two major botanical gardens, the Palmengarten and the University's Botanical Garden. Important is the Frankfurt Zoo. In electronic music, Frankfurt has been a pioneering city since the 1980s, with renowned DJs including Sven Väth, Marc Trauner, Scot Project, Kai Tracid, the clubs Dorian Gray, U60311, Omen and Cocoon. In sports, the city is known as the home of the top tier football club Eintracht Frankfurt, the Löwen Frankfurt ice hockey team, the basketball club Frankfurt Skyliners, the Frankfurt Marathon and the venue of Ironman Germany. Frankfurt is the largest financial centre in continental Europe, it is home to the European Central Bank, Deutsche Bundesbank, Frankfurt Stock Exchange and several large commercial banks.
The Frankfurt Stock Exchange is one of the world's largest stock exchanges by market capitalization and accounts for more than 90 percent of the turnover in the German market. In 2010, 63 national and 152 international banks had their registered offices in Frankfurt, including Germany's major banks, notably Deutsche Bank, DZ Bank, KfW and Commerzbank, as well as 41 representative offices of international banks. Frankfurt is considered a global city. Among global cities it was ranked 10th by the Global Power City Index 2011 and 11th by the Global City Competitiveness Index 2012. Among financial centres it was ranked 8th by the International Financial Centers Development Index 2013 and 9th by the Global Financial Centres Index 2013, its central location within Germany and Europe makes Frankfurt a major air and road transport hub. Frankfurt Airport is one of the world's busiest international airports by passenger traffic and the main hub for Germany's flag carrier Lufthansa. Frankfurt Central Station is one of the largest rail stations in Europe and the busiest junction operated by Deutsche Bahn, the German national railway company, with 342 trains a day to domestic and European destinations.
Frankfurter Kreuz, the Autobahn interchange close to the airport, is the most used interchange in the EU, used by 320,000 cars daily. In 2011 human-resource-consulting firm Mercer ranked Frankfurt as seventh in its annual'Quality of Living' survey of cities around the world. According to The Economist cost-of-living survey, Frankfurt is Germany's most expensive city and the world's 10th most expensive. Frankfurt has many high-rise buildings in the city centre, forming the Frankfurt skyline, it is one of the few cities in the European Union to have such a skyline and because of it Germans sometimes refer to Frankfurt as Mainhattan, a portmanteau of the local Main River and Manhattan. The other well known and obvious nickname is Bankfurt. Before World War II the city was globally noted for its unique old town with timber-framed buildings, the largest timber-framed old town in Europe; the Römer area was rebuilt and is popular with visitors and for eve
Netherlands Institute for Art History
The Netherlands Institute for Art History or RKD is located in The Hague and is home to the largest art history center in the world. The center specializes in documentation and books on Western art from the late Middle Ages until modern times. All of this is open to the public, much of it has been digitized and is available on their website; the main goal of the bureau is to collect and make art research available, most notably in the field of Dutch Masters. Via the available databases, the visitor can gain insight into archival evidence on the lives of many artists of past centuries; the library owns 450,000 titles, of which ca. 150,000 are auction catalogs. There are ca. 3,000 magazines, of which 600 are running subscriptions. Though most of the text is in Dutch, the standard record format includes a link to library entries and images of known works, which include English as well as Dutch titles; the RKD manages the Dutch version of the Art and Architecture Thesaurus, a thesaurus of terms for management of information on art and architecture.
The original version is an initiative of the Getty Research Institute in California. The collection was started through bequests by Frits Lugt, art historian and owner of a massive collection of drawings and prints, Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, a collector, art historian and museum curator, their bequest formed the basis for both the art collection and the library, now housed in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek. Though not all of the library's holdings have been digitised, much of its metadata is accessible online; the website itself is available in both an English user interface. In the artist database RKDartists, each artist is assigned a record number. To reference an artist page directly, use the code listed at the bottom of the record of the form: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/artists/ followed by the artist's record number. For example, the artist record number for Salvador Dalí is 19752, so his RKD artist page can be referenced. In the images database RKDimages, each artwork is assigned a record number.
To reference an artwork page directly, use the code listed at the bottom of the record of the form: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/ followed by the artwork's record number. For example, the artwork record number for The Night Watch is 3063, so its RKD artwork page can be referenced; the Art and Architecture Thesaurus assigns a record for each term, but these can not be referenced online by record number. Rather, they are used in the databases and the databases can be searched for terms. For example, the painting called "The Night Watch" is a militia painting, all records fitting this keyword can be seen by selecting this from the image screen; the thesaurus is a set of general terms, but the RKD contains a database for an alternate form of describing artworks, that today is filled with biblical references. This is the iconclass database. To see all images that depict Miriam's dance, the associated iconclass code 71E1232 can be used as a special search term. Official website Direct link to the databases The Dutch version of the Art and Architecture Thesaurus
Joachim von Sandrart
Joachim von Sandrart was a German Baroque art-historian and painter, active in Amsterdam during the Dutch Golden Age. He is most significant for his collection of biographies of Dutch and German artists the Teutsche Academie, published between 1675 and 1680. Sandrart was born in Frankfurt am Main. According to his dictionary of art called the Teutsche Academie, he learned to read and write from the son of Theodor de Bry, Johann Theodoor de Brie and his associate Matthäus Merian, but at age 15 was so eager to learn more of the art of engraving, that he walked from Frankfurt to Prague to become a pupil of Aegidius Sadeler of the Sadeler family. Sadeler in turn urged him to paint, whereupon he travelled to Utrecht in 1625 to become a pupil of Gerrit van Honthorst, through him he met Rubens when he brought a visit to Honthorst in 1627, to recruit him for collaboration on part of his Marie de' Medici cycle. Honthorst took Sandrart along with him. There he worked with Honthorst and spent time making copies of Holbein portraits for the portrait gallery of Henry Howard, 22nd Earl of Arundel.
Making all of those copies only served to arouse more curiosity in the young adventurer, in 1627 Sandrart booked a passage on a ship from London to Venice, where he was welcomed by Jan Lis, Nicolao Renier. He set out for Bologna, where he was met by his cousin on his father's side Michael le Blond, a celebrated engraver. With him, he crossed the mountains to Florence, from there on to Rome, where they met Pieter van Laer. Sandrart became famous as a portrait-painter. After a few years he undertook a tour of Italy, traveling to Naples, where he drew studies of Mount Vesuvius, believed to be the entrance to the Elysian fields described by Virgil. From there he traveled to Malta and beyond, searching for literary sights to see and paint, wherever he went he paid his way by selling portraits. Only when he was done traveling did he return to Frankfurt, where he married Johanna de Milkau. Afraid of political unrest and plague, he moved to Amsterdam with his wife in 1637. In Amsterdam he worked as a painter of genre works, portraits.
He won a good following as a painter, winning a lucrative commission for a large commemorative piece for the state visit by Maria of Medici in 1638, which hangs in the Rijksmuseum. This piece was commissioned by the Bicker Company of the Amsterdam schutterij, shows the members posing around a bust of Maria of Medici, with a poem by Joost van den Vondel hanging below it; the state visit was a big deal for Amsterdam, as it meant the first formal recognition of the Dutch Republic of the seven provinces by France. However, Maria herself never returned to France; this piece cemented his reputation as a leading painter, in 1645 Sandrart decided to cash in and go home when he received an inheritance in Stockau, outside Ingolstadt, he sold his things and moved there. He received 3000 guilders for 2 books of his Italian drawings, that according to Houbraken were resold in his lifetime for 4555 guilders. Though he rebuilt the old homestead, it was burned by the French, he sold it and moved to Augsburg, where he painted for the family of Maximilian I, the Elector of Bavaria.
When his wife died in 1672, Sandrart moved to Nuremberg, where he married Hester Barbara Bloemaart, the daughter of a magistrate there. This is, his large 1649 painting Peace-Banquet commemorating the Peace of Münster, now hangs in Nuremberg's town hall. He is best known as an author of books on art, some of them in Latin, for his historical work, the Teutsche Academie, published between 1675 and 1680, in more recent editions; this work is an educational compilation of short biographies of artists, inspired by Karel van Mander's similar Schilder-boeck. Both Sandrart and van Mander based their Italian sections on the work of Giorgio Vasari, his work in turn became one of the primary sources for Arnold Houbraken's Schouburg, who wrote a little poem about him: Wat arbeid, moeite, en yver, What work and dedication,En nazoek dat een Schryver And research that a WriterSteets doen moet, weet niemant. The one who has taken it in hand himself. Sandrart published the first biography of the German artist Matthias Grünewald, incorrectly bestowed on the artist the name Grünewald by which he is now popularly known.
Sandrart copied a mistake in Cornelis de Bie's Het Gulden Cabinet on Hendrick ter Brugghen whom De Bie has erroneously called "Verbrugghen". De Bie corrects this mistake in a manuscript and attacks Sandrart for having copied the mistake without proper research in a work of his. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed.. "Sandrart, Joachim von". Encyclopædia Britannica. 24. Cambridge University Press. P. 141. Teutsche Academie der Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste, Joachim von Sandrart, Nürnberg 1675, 1679, 1680 Sandrart's commemorative painting of Maria de Medici's visit in 1638, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam Link to the Sandrart.net digitalization project for the Teutsche Academie His portrait engraved by Philipp Kilian after a painting by Johann Ulrich Mayr
Idstein
Idstein is a town of about 25,000 inhabitants in the Rheingau-Taunus-Kreis in the Regierungsbezirk of Darmstadt in Hesse, Germany. Because of its well preserved historical Altstadt it is part of the Deutsche Fachwerkstraße, connecting towns with fire fachwerk buildings and houses. In 2002, the town hosted the 42nd Hessentag state festival. Idstein lies in the Taunus mountain range, about 16 kilometres north of Wiesbaden; the town's landmark is a 12th-century bergfried and part of Idstein Castle. The Old Town is found between the two brooks running through town, the Wolfsbach in the east and the Wörsbach in the west, on a high ridge reaching up to 400 m above sea level; this comes to an end in the Old Town's north end with the castle and palace crags, behind which the two brooks run together. On the Wolfsbach, remnants of the like-named, now forsaken village can still be made out; the estate agent Gassenbach in the town's south goes back to an old settlement called Gassenbach. West of town, beyond the Wörsbach valley, lies another high ridge with peaks ranging from the Hohe Kanzel to the Roßberg and the Rügert to the Rosenkippel.
Just under the western heights run the Autobahn A 3 and the Cologne-Frankfurt high-speed rail line. On the other side of the Rügert are the constituent communities of Oberauroff and Niederauroff in the valley of the Auroffer Bach. North of Idstein, the Wörsbach valley reaches into the Goldener Grund, fertile cropland that stretches all the way to the Lahn valley. Idstein borders in the north on the town of Bad Camberg and the community of Waldems, in the east on the community of Glashütten, in the southeast on the town of Eppstein, in the south on the community of Niedernhausen, in the southwest on the town of Taunusstein and in the west on the community of Hünstetten; the town is made up of a main town bearing the same name as the whole and eleven other independent villages: Until 1977, Idstein belonged to the Untertaunuskreis, which in the course of district reform was merged with the Rheingau-Kreis into the new Rheingau-Taunus-Kreis. With about 25,700 inhabitants, Idstein is the second biggest town in the district.
Idstein, which had its first documentary mention in 1102 as Etichenstein, was granted town and market rights in 1287 by King Rudolph of Habsburg. Besides the Hexenturm near the old Nassau castle, mentioned, the town has a mediaeval town centre with many timber-frame buildings; the town's oldest preserved house was built in 1410. From the documentary mention in 1102 until 1721, Idstein was, with interruptions, residence of the Counts of Nassau-Idstein and other Nassau lines. One of the Counts, Adolf of Germany, was, as a compromise candidate, the Holy Roman Emperor from 1292 to 1298 falling in battle against the anti-king Albrecht I of Habsburg; the Nassau Counts' holdings were subdivided many times among heirs, with the parts being brought together again whenever a line died out. This yielded an older Nassau-Idstein line from 1480 to 1509 merging once again with Nassau-Wiesbaden and Nassau-Weilburg and, from 1629 to 1721, a newer Nassau-Idstein line. In the 17th century, Count Johann of Nassau-Idstein persecuted witches in Idstein.
In 1721, Idstein passed to Nassau-Ottweiler, in 1728 to Nassau-Usingen, thereby losing its status as a residence town, although it became the seat of the Nassau Archives and of an Oberamt. Nassau-Usingen was united with Nassau-Weilburg in 1806 into the Duchy of Nassau, becoming a member of the Confederation of the Rhine. After the Austro-Prussian War in 1866, Prussia annexed the Duchy as the Prussian province of Hesse-Nassau; the residential palace from the 17th century is used by the Pestalozzischule as a school building. It was expanded with a new building below the palace. From the late 18th century to the mid 20th, Idstein was the centre of an important leather industry. During the Second World War, many women became forced labour for work in the tanneries. In 1959, the dominant tannery in the middle of the town core was shut down for economic reasons; the lands were used until the 1980s as a carpark. Today, new shops and apartments surround the Löherplatz, now a marketplace; the private Kalmenhof clinic in Idstein was drawn into the Nazi Euthanasia programme.
Under Action T4, the Kalmenhof served as a way station for the "killing institute" at Hadamar. After the gassings at Hadamar came to an end in the face of public protests from the churches, the Kalmenhof itself, in the course of Aktion Brandt, became a killing institute. Shortly after the war, reports of young wards being mishandled came to light. Eleven independent villages were merged as of 1971 into Idstein, under the framework of municipal reform; the town's arms might be described thus: Azure a round castle wall embattled with two portcullises open, the wall enclosing two towers, the whole Or, with peaked roofs gules, between the portcullises an inescutcheon azure with a lion rampant Or armed and langued gules among six billets Or. The inescutcheon is the arms borne by the House of Nassau; the town's flag bears this design set against oran
Musée de l’Œuvre Notre-Dame
The Musée de l’Œuvre Notre-Dame is the city of Strasbourg's museum for Upper Rhenish fine arts and decorative arts from the early Middle Ages until 1681. The museum is famous for its rich holdings of original sculptures, glass windows, architectural fragments and building plans of Strasbourg Cathedral, as well as for its considerable collection of works by Peter Hemmel von Andlau, Niclas Gerhaert van Leyden, Nikolaus Hagenauer, Ivo Strigel, Konrad Witz, Hans Baldung and Sebastian Stoskopff; the Musée de l’Œuvre Notre-Dame had been created to merge under a single roof four thematically related but differently focussed collections of all types of Upper Rhenish art until 1681. It is located in the half-Gothic, half-Renaissance core building of the Fondation de l’Œuvre Notre-Dame and in several early Baroque timber-framed houses surrounding it; the first documentary evidence of the Strasbourg Fondation de l’Œuvre Notre-Dame dates back to 1281, it is still responsible for the maintenance of the cathedral.
Besides the building plans, which have been saved from the beginning, they preserve architectural parts, such as fragments of the choir screen destroyed in 1681 and the originals of the sculptures which were removed or knocked down during the French Revolution and replaced by copies. The Société pour la conservation des monuments historiques d’Alsace, for their part, had endeavored to rescue the most valuable components and decorations from churches and chapels, abandoned to destruction or decay throughout Alsace; the painting collection of the city, restored by Wilhelm von Bode as of 1890, had focussed right from the beginning on regional masters, through the donation of the "Portrait of the canon Ambrosius Volmar Keller", a masterpiece of Hans Baldung from the private collection of Wilhelm II. In the new museum of decorative arts of the city, the "Hohenlohe Museum", works of decorative art from the Middle Ages and Early Baroque were exhibited; those four collections, kept in various locations and with various points of concentration, were united in 1931 in the newly founded Musée de l’Œuvre Notre-Dame.
In 1956, after the repair of the damage caused by the bombing of Strasbourg during the war in 1944, it was re-opened in an expanded condition. Besides the cathedral sculptures, glass windows, etc. the collection boasts valuable components from other Strasbourg churches, such as the Temple Neuf, destroyed in 1870, the Saint-Pierre-le-Vieux Church, renovated in 1867, the Église Sainte-Madeleine, destroyed by fire in 1904. In addition, the romanesque components from St Trophimus' Church and the stained glass windows from St. Peter and St. Paul's Church and Mutzig are important. Furthermore, many late gothic altars are assigned to anonymous masters of the Schongauer School. Cécile Dupeux: Strasbourg, Musée de l’Œuvre Notre-Dame, Éditions Scala, Paris, 1999, ISBN 2-86656-223-2 in French Cécile Dupeux et al.: Musée de l’Œuvre Notre-Dame. Arts du Moyen-Âge et de la Renaissance, Éditions des musées de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, 2013, ISBN 9782351251058 Musees-strasbourg.org: Official Musée de l'Œuvre Notre-Dame de Strasbourg website—
Germany
Germany the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central and Western Europe, lying between the Baltic and North Seas to the north, the Alps to the south. It borders Denmark to the north and the Czech Republic to the east and Switzerland to the south, France to the southwest, Luxembourg and the Netherlands to the west. Germany includes 16 constituent states, covers an area of 357,386 square kilometres, has a temperate seasonal climate. With 83 million inhabitants, it is the second most populous state of Europe after Russia, the most populous state lying in Europe, as well as the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is a decentralized country, its capital and largest metropolis is Berlin, while Frankfurt serves as its financial capital and has the country's busiest airport. Germany's largest urban area is the Ruhr, with its main centres of Essen; the country's other major cities are Hamburg, Cologne, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, Dresden, Bremen and Nuremberg. Various Germanic tribes have inhabited the northern parts of modern Germany since classical antiquity.
A region named Germania was documented before 100 AD. During the Migration Period, the Germanic tribes expanded southward. Beginning in the 10th century, German territories formed a central part of the Holy Roman Empire. During the 16th century, northern German regions became the centre of the Protestant Reformation. After the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, the German Confederation was formed in 1815; the German revolutions of 1848–49 resulted in the Frankfurt Parliament establishing major democratic rights. In 1871, Germany became a nation state when most of the German states unified into the Prussian-dominated German Empire. After World War I and the revolution of 1918–19, the Empire was replaced by the parliamentary Weimar Republic; the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 led to the establishment of a dictatorship, the annexation of Austria, World War II, the Holocaust. After the end of World War II in Europe and a period of Allied occupation, Austria was re-established as an independent country and two new German states were founded: West Germany, formed from the American and French occupation zones, East Germany, formed from the Soviet occupation zone.
Following the Revolutions of 1989 that ended communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe, the country was reunified on 3 October 1990. Today, the sovereign state of Germany is a federal parliamentary republic led by a chancellor, it is a great power with a strong economy. As a global leader in several industrial and technological sectors, it is both the world's third-largest exporter and importer of goods; as a developed country with a high standard of living, it upholds a social security and universal health care system, environmental protection, a tuition-free university education. The Federal Republic of Germany was a founding member of the European Economic Community in 1957 and the European Union in 1993, it is part of the Schengen Area and became a co-founder of the Eurozone in 1999. Germany is a member of the United Nations, NATO, the G7, the G20, the OECD. Known for its rich cultural history, Germany has been continuously the home of influential and successful artists, musicians, film people, entrepreneurs, scientists and inventors.
Germany has a large number of World Heritage sites and is among the top tourism destinations in the world. The English word Germany derives from the Latin Germania, which came into use after Julius Caesar adopted it for the peoples east of the Rhine; the German term Deutschland diutisciu land is derived from deutsch, descended from Old High German diutisc "popular" used to distinguish the language of the common people from Latin and its Romance descendants. This in turn descends from Proto-Germanic *þiudiskaz "popular", derived from *þeudō, descended from Proto-Indo-European *tewtéh₂- "people", from which the word Teutons originates; the discovery of the Mauer 1 mandible shows that ancient humans were present in Germany at least 600,000 years ago. The oldest complete hunting weapons found anywhere in the world were discovered in a coal mine in Schöningen between 1994 and 1998 where eight 380,000-year-old wooden javelins of 1.82 to 2.25 m length were unearthed. The Neander Valley was the location where the first non-modern human fossil was discovered.
The Neanderthal 1 fossils are known to be 40,000 years old. Evidence of modern humans dated, has been found in caves in the Swabian Jura near Ulm; the finds included 42,000-year-old bird bone and mammoth ivory flutes which are the oldest musical instruments found, the 40,000-year-old Ice Age Lion Man, the oldest uncontested figurative art discovered, the 35,000-year-old Venus of Hohle Fels, the oldest uncontested human figurative art discovered. The Nebra sky disk is a bronze artefact created during the European Bronze Age attributed to a site near Nebra, Saxony-Anhalt, it is part of UNESCO's Memory of the World Programme. The Germanic tribes are thought to date from the Pre-Roman Iron Age. From southern Scandinavia and north Germany, they expanded south and west from the 1st century BC, coming into contact with the Celtic tribes of Gaul as well
