Forgotten names and monuments of Russian culture
To mark the 60th anniversary of the Department of the History of Russian Culture

On 17-19 October 2001, the Department of the History of Russian Culture held its diamond-jubilee conference. Participants included researchers from the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of the History of Material Culture, the State Hermitage, the State Russian Museum, the Kunstkammer (Russian Academy of Sciences Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography), the Military Historical Museum of Artillery, Engineering and Communications Forces, and also the St Petersburg State Museum of the History of Religion and the Pavlovsk State Museum Preserve.

The first day of the conference was devoted to 18th-century Russian culture. The creative biographies of such little-known artists as Franz Ciegler, Jean Michel, Andrei Grekov, Peter StÔhlin, Vasily Usachev, Pierre Agi and Ivan Tupylev were presented for the first time in a fair degree of detail.

Aspects of 19th-century artistic life were illuminated by papers presented on the second day. Particular attention was paid to new data relating to elements in the decoration of the Winter Palace.

The third and final phase of the conference included, among other things, three papers about the noted artistic photographers Bianchi and Bergamasco, and the amateur photographer Timee.

The Hermitage's Deputy Director for Research, Georgy Vilinbakhov, reported on new entries into the museum's collection of banners.

Summaries of all the papers presented (35 in total) have been published in the compendium entitled Forgotten Names and Monuments of Russian Culture.

Dr. Sergei Androsov, head of the sector of modern painting and sculpture, one of the speakers at the conference

At the conference