14th Seminar on Jewelry and Material Culture

From 11 to16 April 2005 the State Hermitage was host to the 14th seminar on Jewelry and Material Culture. The topics covered in the reports delivered at the seminar were quite diverse: from the very beginning of jewelry production (archeology, ethnography, numismatics, mineralogy, etc) to issues facing today’s producers, technology and design.

More than 50 scholarly institutions took part in the work of the 14th seminar, including the Institute of Archeology in Êiev; the Institute of Gemology in Hamburg; the Institute of the Earth’s Crust and the Technical University in Irkutsk; the Ancient Chernigov Architectural and Historical Museum; the Yaroslavl Pedagogical University; and the Tretyakov Gallery, the Moscow Kremlin Museum, the Tsaritsyno Museum and Park, the Museum of the Orient and the Institute of Archeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, all in Moscow. St Petersburg institutions included the St Petersburg State University, the State Inspectorate for Protection of Monuments, and museums, educational establishments, research organizations, art restoration institutes and other organizations based in the city and its suburbs; of these, 8 institutions took part in the seminar for the first time. There were more than 150 representatives from of all these organizations and they delivered a total of 43 reports.

Specialists discussed the presentations and the following reports generated particular interest: Andrei Bulakh (St Petersburg State University) on columns made of Revno jasper; Valentin Skurlov, on the authenticity of the Spring Flowers Easter egg; Dr. Elizabeth Strack (Hamburg) on fresh-water pearls in Europe; Tatyana Khashkovskaya (St Petersburg, Gipronikel) on pure gold in nature; and also Yuri Diukov (Hermitage) on the results of research into the alloys used in coins dating from Antiquity; Ekaterina Shcherbina (Kremlin Armory) on the rules governing loan of museum items to temporary exhibitions in the 19th century; and Valery Sozinov (Yaroslavl) on the role of archives in the history of jewelry.

The organizers of the seminar were encouraged by the fact that among those who delivered reports were not only well-known scholars and specialists in the areas of art history, archeology, orientalism, numismatics, gemology, and mineralogy (senior professors and holders of doctorates, leading staff of museums and research institutions such as Andrei Bulakh and Natalya Kalashnikov, Elezabeth Strack and Natalya Zhilina, Irina Perfilieva and Olg Gabueva, Marina Neglinskaya, Marina Dolgolenko, Irina Spirina and Boris Shmakin) but also quite young researchers including Ekaterina Nekrasova (Hermitage), as well as Alexandra Anisimova and Marina Pochekunina from Irkutsk.

Aside from the scholarly part of the program, participants in the seminar also toured the Konstantinovsky Palace and Mikhailovsky Palace. They visited the Treasure Rooms of the Hermitage and the exhibition entitled The World of Stone.

At the Seminar

Proceedings of the Conference