Curator’s tour ‘Italy in Lines. Master Drawings by Christoph Heinrich Kniep’

Claudia Nordhoff, curator of the exhibition Italy in Lines. Master Drawings by Christoph Heinrich Kniep, explains in front of the masterpieces. the entire career and artistic development of this extraordinary draughtsman, who accompanied Goethe to Sicily and worked in Italy for many years,

The exhibition includes 42 works. In addition to the museum’s own master drawings, loans from the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, the Goethe Museum Anton and Katharina Kippenberg Stiftung Düsseldorf, the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Istituto centrale per la grafica in Rome are also on display. The show begins with Kniep’s early Hamburg portraits and his Roman drawings, including an extraordinary view of the Colosseum and a rare depiction of the Temple of Sibyl in Tivoli.

Kniep’s journey to Sicily with Goethe is presented in various drawings and watercolours, such as a ‘View of the Theatre of Taormina’. Highlights of the exhibition include two drawings by Goethe and Kniep, each showing the ‘Tomb of Theron in Agrigento’: both sheets from the Klassik Stiftung Weimar are presented side by side.

At the height of Kniep’s career, he created elaborately crafted, large-format ideal landscapes, e.g. with depictions from the Odyssey. In the exhibition, they are juxtaposed with the artist’s detailed plant depictions, which require intensive botanical studies. Finally, two drawings from 1825 form a concluding highlight: they are the only two dated works from the year of the artist’s death.

An exhibition in collaboration with the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Museum Directorate.

With kind support of Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung and Tavolozza Foundation