The exhibition Light of the Renaissance. Painting and Sculpture from the Collection of the State Hermitage Museum in the Republic Museum of Fine Arts in the city of Yoshkar-Ola

On November 22, 2011, as part of the Year of Italy in Russia and the Year of Russia in Italy, an exhibit entitled The Light of the Renaissance. Painting and Sculpture from the Collection of the State Hermitage Museum has opened in the Republic Museum of Fine Arts in the city of Yoshkar-Ola. Two paintings and four sculptures from the 15th-16th centuries will allow viewers to appreciate the distinguishing features of the artistic schools that thrived in the four centres of Renaissance culture in Italy; Florence, Padua, Venice and Milan.

In chronological terms, the oldest work of art presented here is a Florentine relief (painted gypsum), entitled Madonna and Child with Angels. This piece, created in the 1470s, was made on the basis of a marble relief by Antonio Rossellino (1427-1479). Certain aspects of the artistic tradition of the middle ages have been preserved here: both angels are distinguished from the main figures by their smaller size, which must indicate their secondary significance. What identifies this as Renaissance art is the technique of ba-relief, or low-relief, in which the parts stand out from the background to no more than 2-3 centimetres. This type of relief is characteristic for the art of the Renaissance: those elements that face the viewer directly are shown in foreshortening, which makes the individual figures, and the composition as a whole, more lively and dynamic.

The della Robbias, a family of Florentine craftsmen, gained fame for their use of the majolica technique in the creation of sculptures. The Hermitage composition Adoration of the Child, which was created in the workshop of Andrea della Robbia (1435-1525) around 1490-1500, reproduces the central part of a 1479 chancel, ordered by the Brina family for a church in the city of La Verna. This simple composition of white figures on a blue background is decorated by a colourful frame of bright leaves and juicy fruit - the workshop’s trademark.

An interesting exhibition piece here serves as an example of the Paduan school of the plastic arts in bronze. Two bronze figures used at different times and by different artists are united in the statuette entitled The Warrior: an unknown Paduan bronze caster created the horse in around 1500, and a master belonging to Leone Leoni’s circle created the warrior bearing a sword and shield in the middle of the 16th century. During the Renaissance, bronze statuettes were used as decoration in public buildings, nobles’ palaces and scientists’ offices, and, therefore, sculptors would often depict antique subjects. One of the Horses of Saint Mark, a unique classical sculpture that decorates St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice served as the model for the horse depicted in this statuette. The figure of the warrior is in the same pose as the warrior on the so-called Budapest Horse, from the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, whose authorship is attributed to the greatest Renaissance artist, Leonardo da Vinci.

The Venetian artistic tradition is represented by two pieces: a bronze sculpture entitled Apollo from the first quarter of the 16th century and a painting by Paris Bordone from the 1550’s, entitled Venus and Mars. The unknown sculptor depicted the Ancient Greek god not as a mighty archer, as he was in Apollo Belvedere, but as a tender youth with a lyre in his hand. The most important thing here is not so much the interest in antiquity as the sculptor’s striving to express the poetic and harmonious quality of the image in accordance with the style of Venetian art at that time. In the beginning of the 16th century, Giorgione became a reformer in Venetian painting. As a result of his influence, this school’s most productive master, Paris Bordone (1500-1571), created a painting in the style of “poetry”, in which he depicted his cotemporaries with the attributes of ancient gods. To a certain extend, it carries a distant echo of the new conception of man and nature characteristic of Giorgione.

The creator of the painting The Holy Family with John the Baptist, Giulio Cesare Procaccini (1574-1625), is a leading representative of the Lombard school of art. With the help of complex composition, bright colours and highly contrasting light and shadow, Procaccini brings the dynamism and emotion characteristic of the baroque style into a traditional High Renaissance subject.

A publication dedicated to this exhibit (to be released by “Slavia”, Saint Petersburg) with an article by the curator of the exhibit, Sergey Olegovich Androsov, the Head of the Department of Western European Fine Art of the State Hermitage Museum and a doctor of art history.

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Press-conference to the opening of the exhibition

At the opening ceremony

At the exhibition

First visitors

The painting by Giulio Cesare Procaccini

Exhibition catalogue