Battle of Frankenhausen
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The battle of Frankenhausen was fought on 15 May 1525, and was the final act of the Peasants' War: joint troops of George, Duke of Saxony, Landgraf Philipp I of Hesse, and Frederick III, Elector of Saxony, defeated near Frankenhausen, Thuringia, the peasants led by the Anabaptist leader Thomas Müntzer.
At Frankenhausen, the Battle is depicted, along with many other scenes of that age, on the world's largest oil painting, Werner Tübke's "Bauernkriegspanorama", which is 400 feet long, 45 feet high, and housed in its own specially built museum. The painting was ordered by the socialist leadership of East Germany, who regarded Müntzer as a revolutionary and thus as one of their forebears; work on it went on between 1975 and 1987. However Tübke did not produce a heroic painting, contrary to the state's wishes, but depicted the events at Frankenhausen as a colossal failure for all parties involved.
