The State Hermitage Museum: Exhibitions

Interiors of the New Hermitage. The Room of Italian Art

1853

Edward Petrovich Hau

The largest of the three rooms lit from above by a glazed lantern and known for that reason as the Large Skylight Hall was intended for the Italian painting that made up a considerable portion of museum's collection. The watercolour very accurately reproduces the magnificent interior with paintings hung all the way up the walls. The walls pass smoothly into the coving that is entirely covered with gilded relief arabesques. The hall is adorned by malachite vases and table-tops from the Peterhof Lapidary Works and porphyry candelabra from the Kolyban Lapidary Works.
We can make out the subjects of several paintings. On the wall on the left are Sebastiano del Piombo's Pieta and Tintoretto's Birth of John the Baptist. Straight ahead are Carlo Maratti's Portrait of Pope Clement IX, Giovanni Battista Naldini's Bathsheba Bathing, Carlo Dolci's Saint Cecilia and Caravaggio's Lute-Player. On the right are Joseph with the Christ-Child and The Repentance of the Apostle Peter, both by Guido Reni, Jupiter and Io by Lambert Sustris and The Ascension of the Virgin by Il Guercino.