Frankfurt cabinet
The Frankfurt cabinet is usually a walnut veneer , two-door, baroque cabinet from the city of Frankfurt am Main or the surrounding area, but unfurnished models made of solid pine or oak are also common.
These splendid wardrobes, which, thanks to their design, can be dismantled and reassembled into several individual parts in just a few steps, were originally used to store household linen and clothes. They traditionally stood in the hallway of a house or apartment and also served to represent and depict wealth.
Frankfurt cupboards were not only found in patrician houses, but also in a simpler, solid wood form in bourgeois households. Their size indicated the linen supply in the house and its splendor reflected the financial means of the owners. Nowadays there are Frankfurt cupboards in the Bolongaropalast , in the Goethe House and in the Römer .
history
Frankfurt cupboards were built for the first time by the Frankfurt master carpenter Friedrich Unteutsch (around 1600–1670). Unteutsch's Neues Zieratenbuch: Very useful to joiners , joiners or artists and sculptors appeared around 1650. It took a single craftsman up to a year to complete an elaborately veneered and inlaid copy. Frankfurt cupboards were also built outside of Frankfurt, but most of them actually come from Frankfurt workshops.
Construction of a Frankfurt cupboard
A characteristic of the Frankfurt cabinet is its structure, which uses structural elements from architecture . A distinction between pilasters limit and fluted cabinets . The former have three pilaster strips, two at a corner and one in the middle. A straight plinth and a protruding cornice sitting on top serve to create a horizontal structure . With the grooved cabinets, the side walls and the front consist of several deep, partially undercut grooves.
Simple cabinets are made of solid pine trees - or oak built higher-quality pieces of softwood, which with decorative veneers from walnut was veneered. Particularly high-quality cabinets are also decorated with inlays such as figures or tendrils made of various precious woods , ivory or silver .
The Frankfurt cupboard can be completely dismantled into doors, side parts, the rear frame wall as well as cornice and base.
The corrugated cabinet is a special form of the Frankfurt cabinets, which got its name from the corrugated profile strips that are intricately veneered with walnut and decorate the entire front and sides. In addition to the so-called nasal cupboard, there are also transversely veneered, nose-shaped protruding pilaster strips and the door's striking strip, which is also designed.
The connections between the individual parts are deliberately designed to be simple, the rear frame wall is simply plugged in, the cornice and the basement are connected by wedges and the doors are only hung. This simple, but very flexible construction makes the cupboard indestructible, so that many Frankfurt cupboards are still preserved today and are privately owned.
In the past serious mistakes were often made when restoring cabinets, removing the flexible connections and replacing them with glue. Due to this rigid connection, the wood could no longer work, so that it could only be transported as a whole. One noticed very quickly that the Frankfurt cupboard was only so durable because of its flexibility.
literature
- Sibylle Banke: The Frankfurt cupboards . A contribution to the development of style in the German baroque. (undated [1953], dissertation at the art history seminar of the University of Marburg on July 11, 1953).
- Igor A. Jenzen: Frankfurt cabinets . Construction solutions 1500–1800. Ed .: Ludwig Baron Döry. Historisches Museum , Frankfurt am Main 1980 (exhibition catalog).
- Fritz Winzer: DuMont's lexicon of furniture science . Artists - styles - terms. In: DuMont paperbacks . tape 123 . DuMont, Cologne 1982, ISBN 3-7701-1386-1 .