Icon Museum (Frankfurt am Main)

Brief information

The Icon Museum occupies a Baroque building that formerly housed the headquarters of the Teutonic Order. This changes how the place is perceived: the collection of Russian Orthodox icons is not housed in a purpose-built museum structure, but in a building with a different, order-related biography. That is why what matters here is not only the set of exhibits, but also the clash between the building’s former purpose and the current contents of its halls.

The museum opened in 1990 and is considered one of the largest collections of icons in Germany. The collection contains more than a thousand icons from the 16th to 19th centuries, with Russian Orthodox icons forming its core. The history of the collection is also quite specific: it was founded by the Frankfurt physician Jorgen Schmidt-Voigt, who expanded the collection over decades during trips to the USSR.

What to notice right away

It makes sense to compare three layers of the place. The first is the Baroque building itself: it reminds you that the museum is embedded in existing architecture with a previous function. The second is the former headquarters of the Teutonic Order: this fact helps you read the building not as a neutral shell, but as a space whose purpose has changed. The third is the Russian Orthodox icons of the 16th to 19th centuries: they form the core of the collection and provide the museum’s main visual material.

A separate detail is the museum’s position at the eastern end of the Museum Embankment. In the source information, this is the only precise link to the city’s museum space, so it helps to understand the place as part of the embankment rather than as an isolated collection. Temporary exhibitions from the State Historical Museum, other museums, and private collections add a changing layer to the permanent core, but the main focus still remains on the icons and on the building that received them after another history.