It is one of the largest altars in the Landesmuseum Württemberg: the Lichtensterner Altar. It comes from the former Cistercian convent of Lichtenstern near Heilbronn and was probably made around 1465/70 in Lower Swabia. Due to its fragile state of preservation, the object could not be exhibited for some time.
Now, after extensive restoration, the work has been restaged and is once again accessible to visitors to the Württemberg State Museum.
But this not only required a lot of careful work on the altar itself, but also considerations of how to display the exhibit safely in the museum’s non-air-conditioned tower room. Due to the fluctuating but usually very dry humidity in the room and the lack of air conditioning for the entire area, the decision was made in favour of an air-conditioned display case. And what a display case it was!
The result was a large air-conditioned display case with dimensions of 4 m x 4.2 m x 2.1 m and a weight of four tonnes, whereby all components had to be carried by hand up a staircase to the first floor of the museum. Already during the production of the display case, the width of the tower room door of 1.2 m x 2 m had to be taken into account as a limiting size dimension for the individual components.
After ten days of assembly, including the integration of lighting and air-conditioning technology, the display case was handed over to the Landesmuseum Württemberg for the installation of the Lichtensterner altar.
