What has been your personal exhibition highlight at the Liebieghaus to date?
“True to Life: Veristic Sculpture and the Engineering of Illusion” because, as a survey spanning many centuries, it conveyed a completely new and surprising conception of sculpture to most visitors.

What loan would you one day like to bring to the museum?
The so-called Belle Allemande from the Paris Louvre, a life-size figure of St Mary Magdalene executed around 1510 by Gregor Erhart.

What’s your personal tip for a visit to the Liebieghaus?
The busts of the Four Church Fathers from Aschaffenburg, because they demonstrate how vibrant and nuanced late medieval sculpture can be—contrary to all the many biases.

Profile

Dr Stefan Roller has been the head of the Medieval Department at the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung since September 2006. After studying in Karlsruhe, Bamberg and Berlin, he earned his doctorate with a thesis on Late Gothic sculpture of Nuremberg. His professional career initially took him to the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe for a traineeship. After participating in a research project on pre-Dürer Franconian panel painting at the TU Berlin, he became a research assistant at the Geisteswissenschaftliches Zentrum für Geschichte und Kultur Ostmitteleuropas (GWZO) in Leipzig. After his subsequent position as curator of the Old Collection at the Ulmer Museum he came to Frankfurt am Main and the Liebieghaus.

Research focus

Dr Roller’s research focuses are in the areas of Southern German sculpture of the Late Gothic period (in particular Ulm and Nuremberg) and veristic artistic techniques such as polychromy or the use of real materials in sculpture of the Middle Ages, but also of other periods. A further object of his scholarly interest is Late Gothic panel painting of Nuremberg.