Weimar's cultural legacy, from Goethe's residence to birthplace of the Bauhaus movement

South China Morning Post

17-04-2025

It is difficult not to fall in love with the young Sibylle von Jülich-Kleve-Berg, as painted by Europe's premier portraitist at the time of her wedding, in 1526. A young, grey-eyed, pale-skinned beauty with tumbling red tresses, she directs her level gaze off to one side, as if there were something far more important to consider than the adoring viewer right in front of her.
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I am seeing her in digitised form at the castle in Torgau,
Saxony , that was her home, raising the question as to whether she would be quite so winsome in the original oils.
An
art crimes website states that the original was stolen and destroyed but a gallery in the ancient German city of Weimar claims to have the portrait as part of a significant Lucas Cranach collection, and a written inquiry confirms that the image that was destroyed was a different one, stolen from elsewhere. Sibylle was painted several times by both Cranach the Elder and his son.
The portrait of Sibylle von Jülich-Kleve-Berg, at the time of her wedding, in 1526, on display at the Renaissance Hall in Weimar's Green Castle. Photo: Peter Neville-Hadley
The picture in Weimar, a curator assures me by email, was perhaps the elder Cranach's greatest female portrait. I should come and see it for myself, he says.
To Germans, it is not the town's art collection but its literary and architectural history that are the attractions. Polymath Johann Wolfgang Goethe arrived at the ancient city in what is now the central state of Thuringia 250 years ago, riding in a coach sent to collect him by a young admirer, Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach.
The poet, novelist and playwright was to spend most of the remaining 57 years of his life here, not only producing classics of enduring global fame such as Faust (1790), but also as part of the duke's government.
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The duke ennobled the descendant of an innkeeper (to von Goethe) so as to make him acceptable to others in royal service, mostly aristocrats.