Städel presented his large collection of 476 paintings exclusively in the front building. 307 works were on display in five rooms on the first floor, while 118 further pictures hung in two rooms on the second floor. On the ground floor he showed 36 works in the small salon. In addition to that, Städel stored a number of paintings separately. All of this was far from customary: during the eighteenth century, Frankfurt collectors generally needed one or perhaps two rooms for their paintings. Only few, such as the Gogel family, had more picture rooms. Of their house, “Golden Chain” at the Rossmarkt, four rooms were reserved for their art.

Städel’s painting inventory, the so-called Catalogue des Tableaux, written in French, alludes to a tour through the gallery. The numeration of the paintings starts in the central room facing the Rossmarkt. The so-called “Chambre du milieu” was the most prestigious room. Adjacent to this central room were two somewhat smaller rooms, the “Room to the Right” (“Chambre à droite”) and the “Room to the Left” (“Chambre à gauche”). Next, the inventory takes us back to an area called the “Chambre de l’Alcove”, which was divided in a reception room and the stairway.
The inventory subsequently suggests a continuation to the second floor. There, one would have started with a viewing of the “Chambre du milieu”, followed by the “Second Chamber to the Right” (“Seconde Chambre à droite”). A second room (to the left?) was a “Gesamtkunstwerk”. Here, Christian George Schütz had decorated all of the walls with painted landscapes and architectural motifs. As no hanging plans of these rooms have been preserved, it was not possible to reconstruct these for the “Time Machine”.

Lastly, Städel would have presented his visitors with a number of paintings which he kept separately, for example in the “petit salon” on the ground floor. These paintings enjoyed a special status. They were works with particular value to the collector, for example a copy of Correggio’s Zingarella, which was praised by Goethe and Städel kept “encaissé”, in a cassette. Städel could bring these paintings out separately and place them in the proverbial limelight.

On the schematic hanging plans of the three rooms facing the Rossmarkt, the three walls hung with paintings are “folded” outwards, so that one can easily imagine the wall featuring the windows. The fourth floor plan is more difficult to interpret. The title “Chambre de l’Alcove” suggests a single room, while “alcove” hints at a private space (that may have already existed before Städel’s modifications between 1780 and 1785). On the plan, the numeration of the paintings in this room starts in the upper register to the right of one of the doors (“Entrée”), incidentally clarifying the direction of reading.
It occurred to Corina Meyer that, through vertical lines, the paintings were divided into 13 sections. Well recognisable, for example, is the symmetrical structure of the tableaux on one of the longitudinal walls, or the crowded arrangement of small-sized paintings over an empty spot, presumably an open fireplace. Meyer linked these so-marked groups of paintings to subheadings in the painting list below the plan. These – such as “Entrance to the right-hand interior” (“Entrée dans l’interieur à maindroite”, Inventory of the Städel Collection, p. 22, after inv.-no. 233) – hint at two separate rooms, an antechamber and an inner “alcove”.

We as well suspect that, with the name “Chambre de l’Alcove”, Städel referred to two rooms. However, we believe that the two registers of the hanging plan each reflect one room. The long wall and the presumed inglenook provide the vertices for the second room. The width of the last division (inv.-no. 297-307) corresponds exactly with the measurements of a piece of wall between the window side and a centrally placed double door on the first floor. The empty spaces right and left of the tableaux in the first register of the hanging plan we interpret as the exact same opening, namely to the door that leads from the stairway to the larger vestibule. The assumption that Johann Friedrich Städel had hung some of his paintings in the stairway would explain the relatively limited hanging space in plan's first register. It would additionally clarify the arrangement of the large Flemish animal paintings (inv.-no. 224 and 225). In a larger room, the placement of one above the other would have been more than odd. However, for a visitor walking up the stairs, the sight would have offered an arresting prelude.