Cork Model Collection

The Cork Model Collection (Korkmodellsammlung) at Johannisburg Palace is one of the strangest and most remarkable things you can see in Germany. It consists of 24 large-scale models of ancient Roman monuments — including the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the Temple of Vesta, and Hadrian's Villa — all constructed entirely from natural cork by a local craftsman and his son over a period of six decades in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

The models are housed in the south wing of the palace and occupy several rooms. Their detail is extraordinary: columns are reproduced individually, the internal structure of the Colosseum is accurately reconstructed, and the scale relationships between buildings are maintained. The collection is the largest of its kind in the world and is a UNESCO Memory of the World nominee. It is worth visiting Aschaffenburg on its own account.

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A story
The models were made between 1792 and 1850 by a court baker named Georg Carl Liebig and his son Carl May Liebig — men with no formal architectural training who had never visited Rome. Working from engravings and descriptions, they built meticulous scale models of ancient buildings as they would have looked at the height of Roman power. The Colosseum model alone required tens of thousands of individual cork pieces.

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