Applied Arts and Sculptures

Exhibition

Blick in den Raum zur Tafelkultur im 2. Obergeschoss des Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museums

Art in Europe and the world

The rooms on the second floor take visitors on a journey of artistic creation in Europe and across the world from classical antiquity to the 18th century and features roughly 3,000 objects from the collection areas applied art and sculpture. The exhibits are presented against a backdrop in bright colors. The walls of the exhibition rooms are crimson and lemon-colored, purple and grass-green, bright red and sky-blue.  Together with the use of state-of-the-art exhibition technology, this color scheme provides an ideal stage for the multi-faceted collections.

 

The rooms facing the street are devoted to a dazzling display of selected exhibits from the collections – Fürstenberg porcelain, French enamel painting, Italian majolica, and East-Asian and ethnological objects. Two of the rooms present free-standing marble and bronze sculptures.

The rooms facing the park are themed rooms that have been conceptualized to include the works from various different collection areas. Whether lifestyle, branding or eating together, the themes have a close connection to the present. The question of how to build up an image and where to get inspiration for this is not just something that concerns present-day influencers, but was also topical in the early modern period (see the themed room “Der Fürst als Marke” – the ruler as a brand). And while “chilling-out” is a favorite pastime today, in the past the ladies and gentlemen went out hunting.

One of the highlights of this exhibition area is the “Kunstkammer” (cabinet of curiosities), a room with shelves in different sizes that displays a host of quaint objects, such as a prosthetic arm from the 17th century, a bunch of artificial flowers / immortelles from around 1800, the anatomical model of a pregnant woman, corals, ostrich eggs, stones that were said to have magical properties, and last but not least the horn of the legendary unicorn (i.e. the tooth of a narwhale) which was used to create a chalice.