Knauf-Museum Iphofen, Relief art museum in Iphofen, Germany.
The Knauf-Museum Iphofen is a museum housed in a Baroque building from 1693 in the Franconian town of Iphofen, Bavaria, Germany. It holds a large collection of plaster cast reproductions of ancient reliefs from different civilizations, displayed across the building's ornate rooms with their stucco ceilings.
The building was constructed in 1693 as an administrative office for a Prince-Bishop and served official purposes for a long time before changing hands. It was later transformed into a museum thanks to the initiative of brothers Alfons and Karl Knauf, who donated their collection of ancient relief reproductions.
The museum takes its name from the Knauf brothers, who spent decades gathering reproductions of ancient relief art from across the world. Walking through the rooms, visitors encounter works from Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome side by side, which is rarely possible in a single place.
The museum sits in the center of Iphofen and is easy to reach on foot from most parts of the town. All rooms are wheelchair accessible, and it is worth taking your time to look closely at the individual casts, as many contain fine details that are easy to miss at a glance.
Many of the plaster casts were made directly from originals kept in museums around the world, including the Hammurabi law stele from Mesopotamia and the Sesostris III boundary stele from Egypt. Seeing these works here means being able to study them at full scale and up close, which is often not possible in the institutions that hold the originals.
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