1. Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud: Middle Ages-1600

with Roland Krischel
This tour dives into one of the world’s largest collections of medieval paintings, most notably from the Cologne School. The collection’s primary masterpiece is Stefan Lochner’s Madonna of the Rose Bower, which has been dubbed Cologne’s “Mona Lisa.” It also contains numerous triptychs and multi-part altarpieces (by artists including the Master of the Holy Kinship I and II) and major portraits (by artists such as Bartolomäus Bruyn I). There are also outstanding single pieces such as a panel from Albrecht Dürer’s Jabach Altarpiece and the Lucca Madonna of 1250-1260, the oldest work in the museum. The collection reflects the fruitful exchanges with Netherlandish art, represented here by works by masters such as Joos van Cleve, Jan de Beer, Jan Cornelisz. Vermeyen, and Maarten van Heemskerck. Special attention is paid to the Master of the Saint Bartholomew Altarpiece (active ca. 1475-1510), whose place of work – the Netherlands or Cologne – has long been debated. As an exclusive highlight, the early work attributed to him, the Book of Hours of Sophia von Bylant – one of the most precious treasures in the Wallraf collection of prints and drawings – will be displayed to participants. The tour will be led by Roland Krischel, Head of the Medieval Department.

2. Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud: Baroque Collection, including exhibition Collectors’ Dreams

with Anja Sevcik
The visit to the Baroque floor focuses in depth on the rich collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings from the 17th century, which was shaped by the collecting activities and tastes of local bourgeois donors against the backdrop of the city’s historic trade links with the Netherlands. The numerous masterpieces by artists such as Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, Frans Snijders, Rembrandt, Jan Lievens, Hendrick ter Brugghen, Gerard van Honthorst, and Frans Hals I are displayed alongside paintings by other schools in thematically–grouped rooms, which have been gradually redesigned since 2018. Particular attention is paid to recent acquisitions such as works by Frans Francken II, Gortzius Geldorp, Jan van Ravesteyn, Christiaen van Couwenbergh, and the oil sketch by Jacob Jordaens for his monumental Cologne canvas Prometheus Bound. The tour also highlights the exhibition Collectors’ Dreams – Glorious Moments in Netherlandish Baroque Art. This show features 40 paintings and examples from a convolute of some 140 drawings, which the Wallraf received on permanent loan from a private collection in 2022, including little-known masterpieces by Jan Breughel II, Georg Flegel, Jan Steen, Willem Kalf, and Gerard Dou. This in-depth visit will be led by Anja Sevcik, Head of the Baroque Department.

3. Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud: Netherlandish Drawings 1500-1800

with Annemarie Stefes, Sabrina Hehl and Thomas Klinke
This excursion is hosted by two experts: the freelance art historian Dr. Annemarie Stefes, who has spent the past three and a half years researching the museum’s collection of around a thousand Netherlandish (and Dutch) drawings from the 16th to the 19th century (project “Expedition Zeichnung”), and Sabrina Hehl and Thomas Klinke, the museum’s curators and art technologists for drawings and prints. Participants will be able to study a selection of drawings and learn more on new findings, technical aspects, and still unresolved attributions. Some collection highlights, as well as drawings by lesser-known artists, invite close inspection. In addition, participants can view drawings from a private collection which the museum acquired on a long-term loan in 2022. Drawings by or attributed to artists including Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, Jacob Jordaens, Pieter Lastman, Rembrandt, Jan Lievens, Hendrick Goltzius, Jacques de Gheyn (II), Jan Brueghel (I), Johannes Wierix, Esaias van de Velde, Gerard Seghers, Godfried Maes (II), and Jacob de Wit will be on display in the museum’s study room.

4. Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud: Conservator’s Studio

with Iris Schaefer, Ruth Klinkhammer, Kristin Krupa and Caroline von Saint-George
The tour starts in the permanent exhibition The Museum’s Laboratory, where visitors have a unique behind-the-scenes look at the art and science of conservation. Participants are then invited to visit the Department of Art Technology and Restoration, where they can familiarize themselves with the facilities for examining and restoring paintings. During this visit, current research and restoration projects will be presented, such as the treatment of Pieter Aertsen’s Market Scene, the reconstruction of paint application for the design of tree foliage in a 17th-century Dutch landscape painting and the development and content of the digital story Revealed! Painting Techniques. This in-depth visit will be led by Iris Schaefer, Head of the Department of Art Technology and Conservation, and her colleagues Ruth Klinkhammer, Kristin Krupa and Caroline von Saint-George.

5. Museum Schnütgen

with Moritz Woelk and Karen Straub
The traditional focus of Museum Schnütgen, which was created out of the private collection of cathedral canon Alexander Schnütgen in 1906, is the art of the Rhineland complemented by works from the neighboring regions. The holdings extend from the Middle Ages via the Baroque to the medieval revival of the nineteenth century, with easel painting, for historical reasons, barely represented.

Over the decades, the collection has been expanded through the addition of important works from the regions that now constitute Belgium and the Netherlands. The majority of these hundred-plus works date from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They include statuettes from the workshop of the Rimini Master (ca. 1430), works of stained glass such as the cabinet panels depicting the story of Tobias (southern Netherlands, ca. 1500), textiles such as the chasuble of the Utrecht Carpenters’ Guild (Utrecht, 1509), a Flemish book of hours (ca. 1510), pipe-clay figures from Utrecht plus ivory statuettes and double-headed rosary beads from the southern Netherlands dating from as late as the Baroque. Two works of wooden sculpture worthy of mention – wooden sculpture of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries being the largest single category of works in the museum – are the Great Calvary with its many figures (southern Netherlands, ca. 1430–1440) and the Passion Retable by Jan Borman (III) (Brussels, ca. 1520). In 2018, the museum made an outstanding acquisition from the time of the soft style of Gothic art in the form of two alabaster reliefs depicting the Annunciation (probably Burgundian Netherlands, ca. 1410–1420). This excursion will be led by Moritz Woelk, director, and Karen Straub, curator at Museum Schnütgen.

6. NS-Dokumentation Zentrum Köln

with Birte Klarzyk
The destination of this excursion is the EL-DE-Haus at 23–25 Appellhofplatz. Between 1935 and 1945 the EL-DE Haus was the headquarters of the Cologne Gestapo. As such it came to epitomize the Nazi reign of terror in Cologne but also, after 1945, the way in which the City of Cologne dealt with, and subsequently confronted, its Nazi past. It is surely an irony of history that this very building should have survived the war while most of the surrounding buildings were destroyed. As a memorial site, the former Gestapo prison, with its ten preserved cells including prisoners’ inscriptions, forms the heart of a Nazi Documentation Center that was founded in 1979 and steadily expanded over the following years. The much-honored Center – in 2000 it was named European Museum of the Year and in 2006 it received the History Channel’s History Award – is a place of commemoration, learning and research in one. Birte Klarzyk, Jewish history researcher at the Center, will introduce the building, its history and its research-, exhibition- and museum-focused educational projects.

7. Cologne Cathedral; tour over the roof

While Cologne Cathedral is a complete Gothic cathedral, not every part of the building dates from the Middle Ages. It was finished in the age of the Industrial Revolution, supported mainly by the royal house of Prussia as a symbol of German unity. Nowhere is this clearer than during a guided tour of the cathedral’s roofs. Where we would perhaps have expected a historic wooden truss roof, we are surprised to find a filigree steel construction older than the Eiffel Tower. The tour takes visitors high above the city to unknown tower spaces containing storage rooms and cathedral workshops, opening up one of the most spectacular views Cologne has to offer. The guides in this tour are (former) employees of Cologne’s Dombauhütte.