Magnificent World of the Grotesque

On 4 February, 2003, in the Alexander Hall of the Winter Palace (Room No. 282) opened an exhibition showing over 150 objects of Renaissance applied art and arms from the Hermitage collection.

Grotesque is "a variety of painting, imaginative and amusing, with which ancients decorated piers where in some places nothing short of objects soaring in the air would suit, therefore they painted there various ridiculous monsters generated by nature or by artists’ fantasy and caprice" (Giorgio Vasari).

The exhibition brings the audience in contact with the spirit of the age through ornaments. Design imagined by the artist and set down to a sheet of paper is expressed in various materials and techniques. The displayed plates, dishes, wine refrigerators, salt basins, desk sets, lamps, apothecary pitchers, holy water vessels, castors for women in childbirth, cases for scrolls and furniture upholstery, goblets, cups, knockers, keys, prayer books, hunter whistles, pendants, rings, tournament armory, shields, arbalests, guns, bed heads, trimmings, altar cloths and clergy garments are all likewise decorated with grotesque irrespective of their secular or religious application.

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Curator Dr. Tatiana N. Kosourova and State Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky are opening the exhibition

The exhibition curator Dr. Tatiana N. Kosourova of the Department of West European Art

At the exhibition