My Hermitage: How the Hermitage Survived Tsars, Wars, and Revolutions

Timeline It is under the shelter of these guardians that the Hermitage timeline unfolds. Of course, its roots lie in Peter the Great’s Kunstkamera, the first public museum and a symbol of European enlightenment and public access to knowledge. The Hermitage also was a symbol of sharing in European culture, but in its aristocratic version. Décor from the imperial private rooms (for example, the Turkish and Chinese mezzanines) was moved into receiving rooms for a small circle, then into rooms where guests and ambassadors were taken for receptions being held for them, and gradually the museum became more and more accessible and interesting for people of all strata and levels of education. However, it retains its aristocratic spirit and imperial mien to this day, even as it receives millions of visitors from all walks of life.

Thus, the Gotzkowski collection was placed in the galleries along the Hanging Garden, where it was admired by nobles, who chatted about both business and trifles or played cards, allegedly betting with diamonds. The rules of behavior for the Hermitage meetings, shown earlier, are frequently quoted. On the one hand, they demand insouciance and merriment.

On the other, they call for restraint to make a clear distinction from the wild parties thrown

by Emperor Peter.

Mass purchases that were swift, passionate, and enthusiastic followed. The dictate was to acquire the best of the best. The determination was made by Catherine’s European scholarly friends (such as Denis Diderot), experienced dealers (François Tronchen of Geneva, for one), and of course, the Russian ambassadors who knew the empress’s taste and moods.

The stories of acquisitions include the purchase of the Crozat, Walpole, and Bruhl collections. Baron Pierre Crozat was a famous French collector, whose heirs decided to sell his collection. Diderot advised Catherine to buy it. With the help of his friend Prince Dmitri Alexeyevich Golitsyn, the Russian ambassador to Paris and then The Hague, the purchase was made. Rembrandt’s Danae, Rubens’s Bacchus, Giorgione’s Judith, and several hundred other masterpieces came to St. Petersburg.1 It created an enormous scandal. The barbarians were taking Europe’s treasures!

The National Library of France in Paris holds the trade catalogue of the Crozat collection, in which the artist Gabriel de Saint-Aubin reproduced Danae as a painting worthy of special attention.2 The painting is truly exceptional, full of mysteries, and destined to a special fate. At the imperial Hermitage, it was moved many times from places of honor to out-of-theway spots and then back again. At times it seemed too erotic, while at others, insufficiently beautiful. In 1985 a maniac with a knife and acid attacked it; somehow Rembrandt’s works seem to attract maniacs. The painting was in treatment for many years; it has not recovered completely, but it still remains a great masterpiece, a hymn to the anticipation of love.

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Above: Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn Danaë 1636–1646 pp. 44–45

Left: Frans Snyders Fish Market Between 1618 and 1621

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The Second Evacuation The Winter Palace was the site of historic events. In 1905 a demonstration of workers was fired upon in front of it—and thus began the first Russian revolution. This event led to the creation of the State Duma, whose deputies Nicholas II received formally in the St. George Hall in the Winter Palace.

World War I changed the functions of the palace when the main formal rooms were turned into a huge military hospital.

After the February revolution, a part of the Winter Palace, primarily the private apartments of the imperial family, housed the provisional government, members of whom were arrested during the symbolic storming of the palace in October 1917 after the almost symbolic firing upon the building from the Peter-Paul Fortress and the cruiser Aurora. That same year, in the fall, the collections of the Hermitage were evacuated a second time, to Moscow as the Germans advanced on St. Petersburg. Two trains managed to leave; the third remained because the October Revolution had begun.

Troops of the Provisional Government in the Winter Palace 1917. Photographer K. K. Kubesh

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His Imperial Highness the Heir Tsarevich and Grand Duke Alexei Nikolayevich Hospital.

A hospital ward in the Nicholas Hall of the Winter Palace October 1915. Photographer I. Otsup. 23.5 x 28.9

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he Hermitage did not accept the Hermitage “along with” the Winter Palace was authority of the Bolsheviks and Soviets declared a museum. But the transfer of the and declared a boycott, which gradually Winter Palace to the Hermitage dragged out eroded with the appearance of determined for many decades. At one point the palace commissars and acute needs. The museum was, along with everything else, the residence was not damaged during the storming. The of Anatoly Lunacharsky, who was in charge directors of the Hermitage did need to protect of all cultural and educational affairs in Soviet the royal wine cellars from revolutionary Russia. The Council of the Hermitage, which soldiers and the collections from Ukrainian had boycotted the Bolsheviks, met in the delegates who demanded part of the museHermitage. Between the two centers of power, um’s works. At that time, the Hermitage Alexandre Benois, the famous artist, art histoaccepted a number of private collections, rian, and curator of the Picture Gallery, acted not without hesitation, to protect them; they as “messenger and parliamentarian.” © 2015 Skira Rizzoli Publications. All Rights Reserved have remained in the museum forever. The

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ne of several variants of Titian’s famous composition, the first of which was painted in Rome for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese and is now in the Capodimonte Museum in Naples, opens a new page in the artist’s work—his famous “poesies” based on mythological themes. The great success of these works prompted the artist to return over and over to the same subject, each time adding small changes.

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he Hermitage painting was extremely famous in the seventeenth century—in 1633 an entire book, Titiani pictoris celeberrimi Danaë, was published in Paris; the painting was then in the gallery of the Marquis de La Vrillière, state secretary of France.

From the Crozat Collection, this work was acquired under the name Portrait of Titian’s Mistress, for the desire in those days was great to tie the artist’s name romantically with the beauty he had painted in other works as well. There were attempts in the nineteenth century to identify the model as Eleonora Gonzaga, Duchess of Urbino, but they were not successful, and the lady’s name remains unknown.

What it certain is that she is the famous “Venus of Urbino” (Uffizi Gallery, Florence),Skira paintedRizzoli by the Venetian master. © 2015 Publications.

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Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) (1488/1490–1576) Danaë Italy. Ca. 1554. Oil on canvas.

47¼ x 735⁄8 in. (120cm x 187 cm).

Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) (1488/1490–1576) Portrait of a Young Woman Italy. Ca. 1536. Oil on canvas.

37¾ x 29½ in. (96 cm x 85 cm).

Reserved

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The doors also lead to the Nevsky Gallery of the Old Hermitage. Once called “the seventh reserve half,” it served in tsarist times as guest rooms for VIP guests. Today it houses the gallery of Italian Renaissance art, where the astonishingly beautiful Madonna from the Annunciation, half of a diptych by Simone Martini (the other half is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC), and marvelous works by Fra Angelico, which are truly angelic and divine, hang. Grigory Stroganov bequeathed a Fra Angelico reliquary to the Hermitage. Two works by Leonardo attract crowds. The Benois Madonna belonged for many years to the famous Benois family, who according to legend bought it from an itinerant Italian musician. The young woman depicted is sincerely and naively gladdened by her infant, who already holds a few symbols of his future life. The other work was purchased, not without protest by the Italian public, from the Litta family. The Madonna Litta depicts a woman whose eyes forebode her son’s tragic fate, and he holds a symbol of future bloodshed, a bird with a red chest. This painting is a particular favorite of visitors, one of the museum’s signature works, although we cannot rule out that the child’s figure may have been painted by one of the master’s students—and not Leonardo.

Parallel to the paintings of the Florentine school lie the rooms dedicated to early Venetian painting. The tranquil Annunciation by Cima da Conegliano hangs opposite the charmingly tumultuous Judith by Giorgione. The latter is another of the Hermitage’s signature works. It was one of the first masterpieces subjected to deep scholarly restoration, a model of successful and extremely cautious cleaning. This painting was once the cause of a minor scandal of the Soviet type: In 1976 the world marked the five hundredth anniversary of Giorgione. The Hermitage printed a New Year’s card that featured a picture of our masterpiece. Normally considered an intelligent newspaper, Literaturnaya Gazeta attacked the museum with a semi-sarcastic denunciation, claiming that we were offering Soviet people a New Year’s card with a Jewish heroine resting her foot on a severed head. The museum had to explain that the point was the great artist—not his subject matter. (By the way, the subject is in the Bible, not in Jewish canonical texts. Interestingly, the painting itself used to be the door of an ordinary closet, which is in no way reprehensible, incidentally.)

The Titian Room is next to the Leonardo Room. The Hermitage owns one of Leonardo’s earliest works, the recently restored The Flight into Egypt, and one of his latest, Saint Sebastian, which is expressionist but clearly resembles antique images. Between them hangs Danae and Repentant Mary Magdalene, recently put back into its carved frame, which is rather elaborate but typical of the era. This particular painting was in Titian’s house until his death. The gallery is completed by Italian Mannerists. There are not many, but few other places have such marvelous works, expressive in color and line, by Pontormo, Rosso, and Parmigianino!

Heads of state enter the Hermitage by the Soviet Staircase. Most visitors use the Embassy Staircase, where they are met by the gods of Olympus, the work of Gaspar Diziani depicted on a huge plafond. The first plafond burned during the fire of 1839. Then the Olympic one was taken from the imperial storeroom and installed. It suffered damage during the blockade but was beautifully restored by Leningrad restorers, who later worked on the enormous plafond of the Great Hall of the Catherine Palace in Tsarskoye Selo.

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Leonardo da Vinci Madonna with Child (Benois Madonna) 1478-1480

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Antonio Canova Cupid and Psyche 1796. France

Gallery of Ancient Painting

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he first room visitors to the new museum entered extended for sixty-two meters as it does now, and it is covered by nine cupolas. Eighty paintings are attached to the walls; they were executed in encaustic on brass plates. In counterbalance to a similar interior in the Alte Pinakothek (Munich), which is devoted to the history of contemporary painting,

this space became the Gallery of Ancient Painting, where the images tell the story of art that “began in antiquity and ends its brilliant path in Constantinople, reborn there in the form of Christianity and with it comes to Russia.” Thus the exhibition supported the idea of the succession of greatness: Egypt-Antiquity-Constantinople-Russia.

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Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) Lady in Black France. Ca. 1876. Oil on canvas. TK x TK in. (63 x 53 cm).

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) The Boulevard Montmartre in Paris (The Boulevard Montmartre in the Afternoon, Sunny Weather) France. 1897. Oil on canvas. 291⁄8 x 36½ in. (73 x 92 cm).

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he mid-1890s were difficult for time expressed in delight in a letter to his Pissarro. His paintings were not son. It took more than two months to create selling, but the dealer Durand-Ruel a series of thirteen pictures with a single supported him. He commissioned a series composition, where the lamppost in the of views of the Boulevard Montmartre. foreground served as a starting point in the Pissarro came to Paris and rented a room construction of perspective. The weather overlooking the boulevard. “The subject interfered: about six weeks into the work is terribly difficult, almost a bird’s-eye the artist reported that the “paintings are view, carriages, omnibus, people among very well elaborated,” but he was “held up by big trees, by big buildings, all this has the absence of sun.” The sun was apparently to be brought into balance, it’s simply required for the Hermitage painting, which incredible! . . . nothing but to figure it out has a subtitle: The Boulevard Montmartre in © 2015 Skira Rizzoli Publications.

All Sunny Rights Reserved somehow,” he grumbled and at the same the Afternoon, Weather.

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Henri Rousseau (1844–1910) The Jardin du Luxembourg. Monument to Chopin France. 1909. Oil on canvas. 15 x 18½ in. (38 x 47 cm).

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e would not find the corner captured by Rousseau in the Luxembourg Gardens today—and not only because the monument to Chopin, a sculpture by the now-forgotten George Dubois, was lost during the German occupation. Using reality as a starting point, Rousseau easily sacrificed external resemblance.

Following his intuition he omitted everything unneeded. The static figures are markedly voluminous and shown strictly in profile. The foliage of the trees is magnified.

The individual and ephemeral are replaced with the general and the immobile. The artist achieved such alienation by creating the landscape in his studio, which is attested by the word composition in the artist’s inscription on the back of the painting: “Vue de Luxembourg.

Monument de Chopin. Composition.

Henri Rousseau.”

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idia Nikolayevna Delektorskaya spent the greater part of her life serving the art of Matisse. A Russian girl from Siberia who grew up in the émigré community in Harbin, China, she came to Paris at the age of nineteen without a profession and no French. In October 1932 she began working for Henri Matisse and she remained in his house for twenty-two years. She was with the artist in the final decades of his life, not only as an extraordinary model, but also as a support, friend, secretary, housekeeper, and

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) Portrait of Lidia Delektorskaya France. 1947. Oil on canvas.

TK x TK in. (64.3 x 49.7 cm).

sometimes even nurse. Thanks to her gifts, the Hermitage has the master’s late works, his sculptures, drawings of astounding perfection, and books previously not present in the collection. She readily worked with the staff members who curated the gifts, helping them with advice and literature. In 1985 the museum director Boris Borisovich Piotrovsky gave her an unlimited pass to the museum as a “consultant of the Hermitage.”

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