The State Hermitage Museum: Information

Hermitage. Great Museums of the World series
A book by Mikhail Piotrovsky
SLOVO Publishing House. Hardbound with dust jacket and gift packaging, printed in Italy, with more than 500 illustrations

To mark the 300th anniversary of the founding of St Petersburg, the SLOVO Publishing House has put out Mikhail Piotrovsky’s festive album entitled Hermitage, which is devoted to the museum’s very rich collection of paintings and to its history.

The book is published within SLOVO’s Great Museums of the World series which first appeared in 1998 and has been added to ever since. Books in this series tell about the world’s most famous museums and their painting collections. Packaged in a dark blue and gold gift box, the volume has a cloth binding and dust jacket. Thus far individual volumes have been devoted to the Vatican, the Uffizi and Pitti galleries, the Prado, London’s National Gallery, the art museums of Berlin, and Venice. On the 300th anniversary of the founding of St Petersburg, SLOVO Publishing House offers readers Mikhail Piotrovsky’s album Hermitage, which is devoted to the museum’s very rich collection of paintings and to its history. The publishers worked on this book for more than three years.

The volume directs attention to works created by master painters of a number of different periods and countries, from the Fayum portraits up to Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square. Leonardo, Titian and Rembrandt, Caravaggio and Giorgione, Simone Martini and Fra Beato Angelico, Tiepolo, Rubens and Van Dyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Snyders, Greuze and Watteau are among the great names on a list that goes on and on. Nineteenth and twentieth century art are widely and substantially covered as well: Paul Cezanne, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Eugene Boudin, Maurice Vlaminck, Pablo Picasso, and Vasily Kandinsky among others.

The reader will find in this book much more than the history of the painting collection of a famous museum. Each of its sections offers a substantial and expertly crafted resume of one or another period in the development of painting. Then there are more than 500 superb full-color illustrations. These illustrations are accompanied by brilliant short descriptions of the given artist’s work, individual style and remarks on various of his canvases. The volume is organized in chronological order, so that the reader literally passes from one painting to another and follows the stages of development of the various artists who are presented here.

Ñîntents

Ìikhail Piotrovsky. Hermitage - The Russian Dimension in World Art
Mikhail Piotrovsky, World Painting as reflected in the Hermitage
Fayum Portraits - Byzantine Icons - the Orient - Simone Martini
15th Century: Fra Angelico - Leonardo - Rogier van der Weyden
16th Century: Raphael - Giorgione- Titian - Cranach
17th Century: Caravaggio - Rubens - Rembrandt - Poussin
18th Century: Tiepolo - Boucher - Fragonard
19th Century: Friedrich - Monet - Cezanne
20th Century: Ìàtisse - Picasso - Êàndinsky - Ìàlevich
Bibliography, index of names, index of painters and works of art

A book by Mikhail Piotrovsky, Hermitage
Great Museums of the World series