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The Staraya Derevnya Restoration and Storage
Centre - 2005 On 6 December 2005 a special trip to the Staraya Derevnya Restoration and Storage Centre was arranged for journalists. Participants were shown the new open storage areas of the Departments of the History of Russian Culture, of the East, of the Ancient World and of the History of Western European Art. In the section belonging to the Department of the History of Russian Culture two complexes of frescoes were on display, from the Church on the Channel (na Protoke) in Smolensk (early 13th century) and the Church of the Nativity in Pskov (late 14th century). During excavation of the Church on the Channel all the remnants of paintings were removed from the walls and processed by Hermitage restorers. For the most part they are ornamental murals. The frescoes from the Church of the Nativity are narrative and single-figure compositions on Old and New Testament subjects. The display also includes around 600 icons dating from between the late 18th and early 20th centuries. Many of these icons were brought back from various regions of Russia by members of scholarly expeditions. Special mention should be made, though, of icons that were formerly in the Winter Palace. These include, for example, three icons from the Deesis tier in the Great Church of the Winter Palace and an icon of St Serafim of Sarov that was probably kept in the private apartments of the imperial family. Of particular interest, too, are several icons from the Marble Palace painted by artists from Mstiora and icons painted by Funtusov, a serf artist belonging to the Counts Sheremetev. The Department of the East presents part of the collection of frescoes from Penzhikent, an early mediaeval Sogdian city located 60 kilometres from Samarkand that perished by fire during the Arab conquest of the early 8th century. The unique murals were found in the course of excavations that have been carried out since 1947 by the State Hermitage’s Tajikistan Archaeologicalnot Expedition. This is a world-ranking collection unrivalled in any other museum. The removal of the murals from the walls, their restoration and conservation are to the credit of the Hermitage’s Laboratory for the Scientific Restoration of Monumental Painting which was created as a consequence of these excavations. Fifty-eight seasons of excavations have made Penzhikent the most studied early mediaeval city in Asia and its painting a rediscovered chapter in the history of world art. From the 5th century onwards temples and palaces, and later the homes of many citizens were decorated with statues and murals. Compositionally the frescoes consisted of several friezes running round the walls featuring hunting and feasting scenes and illustrations of legends about Rustam, local heroes, amazons and characters from the Indian Mahabharata. The Department of Western European Art presents various examples of sculpture: copies made of ancient works in the 18th century, Renaissance sculpture and contemporary works, which are allotted a considerable place in the display. Many of these pieces are signed authorial works. They include, for example, numerous sculptural portraits by noted representatives of various schools that were commissioned by members of the imperial family and kept at one time in the Winter Palace. The wide range of materials featured - marble, bronze, wood, terracotta, majolica and plaster - makes it possible to study the techniques and technology of sculpture as a branch of the fine arts. Restoration artists from the Laboratory for the Scientific Restoration of Sculpture and Semiprecious Stone have carried out an enormous amount of work giving new life to many items. One example is the colossal marble Pieta made by a 19th-century Italian master after the original by Antonio Montauti. The pieces of ancient sculpture transferred to the repository were for the most part previously not on display. They are statues, reliefs and examples of monumental architecture that are mainly of no great size, fragmented and as yet unrestored. The marble fragments and statuettes present a wide range of types and compositions characteristic of Hellenic and Roman plastic art: the monumental temple statue; draped figures; female headed and nude torsos belonging to the Aphrodite of Cnidus or Aphrodite Anadyomene types. Of great interest is a statue of a female goddess seated on a swan. In the process of de-restoration (the removal of material added in a previous restoration), the ancient fragment, possibly dating from the 1st century B.C., was freed of 19th-century additions. During the visit to the Restoration and Storage Centre the journalists were also shown the classrooms: the museum studies classroom - the practical training facility of the Department of Museum Studies and Preservation of Monuments, part of the Philosophical Faculty at St Petersburg State University, and the "Past at Our Fingertips" classroom facility for visually-impaired children. |
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