QUARANTINE BLOG # 208

October 24, 2020

Today we travel to the Rodina, to Mother Russia, to visit one of the most incredible museums in the world, the Hermitage, with a look at the museum’s founders, their curiosities, and their collections.

The Hermitage in St Petersburg is Russia’s premier museum. It began life as the private collection of the Russian tsars, and is now known as the State Hermitage Museum.

In 1712 Peter the Great moved the Russian capital from Moscow to St Petersburg.  There he founded Russia’s first public museum, the Kunstkamera – “collection of natural science.”  Peter was particularly proud of his skill in pulling teeth and gave demonstrations. His dental equipment is today on display at the Hermitage. Some of the teeth he drew are labeled with the identify of whose they were – “a person who made tablecloths,” for example, or “a fast-walking messenger” (evidently not fast enough).

Peter’s picture collection ran to over 400 works by the time of his death.  After his death, a new gallery was added to the museum which contained a wax figure of Peter himself, made by the leading court sculptor. The waxwork has become one of the most famous images of Peter in Russia.

As with the tsars before her, Yekaterina Vilakya – Catherine the Great – who ruled Russia from 1762 until 1796 – built a Hermitage and regarded it as a sort of private club, whose members she personally selected. To ensure that everyone behaved properly in the intimacy of her Hermitage, she drew up a set of rules which she had mounted on the wall:

1. All ranks shall be left behind at the doors, as well as swords and hats.

2. One shall be joyful but shall not try to damage, break or gnaw at anything.

3. One shall speak with moderation and quietly so that others do not get a headache.

4. One shall eat with pleasure, but drink with moderation so that each can leave the room unassisted.

5. One shall not wash dirty linen in public and shall mind one’s own business until one leaves.

Catherine was the presiding genius of the Hermitage.  She described her purchase of 4,000 Old Masters paintings as “gluttonous,” but they remain among the museum’s prizes.

From her first purchase she acquired two Rembrandts, The Incredulity of St Thomas, and Potiphar’s Wife.

Additionally, she collected 38,000 books,  10,000 engraved gems, roughly 10,000 drawings, 16,000 coins and medals.

Catherine was not much interested in sculpture, but she bought the only Michelangelo marble in the collection – the unfinished Crouching Boy – and commissioned Jean-Antoine Houdon’s Voltaire, which depicts the French philosopher in old age, life-size, seated in an armchair.

Engraved gems were her greatest love, a collecting field to which little attention is now paid. In antiquity, precious and semiprecious stones – typically 3 inches or smaller – were often carved in relief or engraved with portraits or little pictures commemorating special events. Here is a video I made of some of her gems https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9h4bnDN72g.

Catherine commissioned Denis Diderot, a French writer, who edited history’s first multi-volume encyclopedia, to become her librarian, and paid his salary paid for 50 years in advance – $12,000,000 today.

His greatest coup was the 1766 purchase of Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son for $1.2 million. The painting, with its extraordinary psychological sensitivity, is regarded by some as the greatest work of art in the Hermitage.

From the most important private collection in France in the early 18th century, Catherine acquired Rembrandt’s Danae. It depicts the mythical character of Danae, welcoming Zeus into her bed, and who later bore his son, Perseus. Rembrandt originally used his first wife, Saskia, as the model in the painting, but later replaced her face with the face of his mistress Geertje Dircx. 

The Duchess of Kingston was one of the most unusual visitors to St Petersburg during Catherine’s reign. Born Elizabeth Chudleigh, she achieved a succes de scandale in London. Among her many escapades was that of attending the Venetian ambassador’s ball naked. In 1744 she secretly married a young naval lieutenant, and in 1769 the fabulously wealthy Duke of Kingston. In 1776 she was tried for bigamy and found guilty – but let off with a fine.

Catherine was much taken with the Duchess, giving her a fine house in St Petersburg and a nearby estate. The most important Kingston piece is the Peacock Clock. It was made by London jeweler James Cox.

First a chime of bells starts to play and an owl moves his head from side to side. Then the peacock, which stands on a metal hill, begins to spread his tail while nodding his head in a realistic manner. He executes a 180-degree turn to display his tail feathers. And finally a metal rooster lifts his head and begins to crow. The clock face is on the head of a mushroom under the gilt-bronze oak tree; a dragonfly sitting on the mushroom marks the seconds. Watch the clock in motion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TCzRyIZRIc.

The Duchess brought the clock to St Petersburg carefully disassembled, with hundreds of delicate pieces of mechanism packed separately. It took a gifted Russian mechanic and inventor, Ivan Kulibin, two years, from 1792 to 1794, to make it work.

Catherine’s death in 1796 severed the highly personal relationship between ruler and art. After Catherine, the tsars treated the collection as a responsibility rather than a source of personal delight.

To paraphrase “Smokey and the Bandit,” there is so much to tell, and so little time to tell it, so we will skip massive sections of history, and come back next week with a look at the Hermitage from 1917 to the present.

Ya edoo koodah sahm tsar edyet peshkom.  Das veydonya.

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