The State Hermitage Publishing House has brought out a scholarly illustrated catalogue ARS VIVENDI. Frans Sneiders i flamandskii natiurmort XVII veka [ARS VIVENDI. Frans Snyders and Seventeenth-Century Flemish Still Lifes].
The catalogue is devoted to the major exhibition “ARS VIVENDI” currently being held in the Forehall and Nicholas Hall of the Winter Palace. The project has brought together more than 70 paintings by Flemish artists in the still life and animal genres from the 17th-century heyday of art in Flanders. Works of applied art – tapestries, costly silver goblets, carved ivory , Chinese porcelain and more – also form an integral part of the display.
The exhibition has been organized by the State Hermitage with the participation of the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, the Peter the Great Central Naval Museum, the Saint Petersburg branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Research Museum of the Russian Academy of Arts, the Art Centre gallery (Moscow) and the private collection of Valeria and Konstantin Mauerhaus.
The publication has a structure that readers may find not entirely customary, since it is divided into three parts: “Paintings”, “Botanical Illustrations” and “Decorative and Applied Art”, each containing scholarly texts and a catalogue section.
The catalogue has a foreword written by Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, entitled “Snyders’s Stalls remained in their place”.
The “Paintings” section acquaints readers with the history of the emergence of the still-life genre and the classification of its sub-types, and also casts light on the role of individual artists in the development of this tendency in painting. The catalogue part covers pictures by Frans Snyders (1579–1657) and other 17th-century Flemish exponents of decorative painting from the collections of the State Hermitage, the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, the Research Museum of the Russian Academy of Arts and private collections.
In the “Botanical Illustrations” section, a specialist from Saint Petersburg State University explains the origins of many of the plants depicted in Flemish still lifes, while an appendix to the text identifies specific flora in some of the paintings exhibited. The oeuvre of the artist and entomologist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) is represented by watercolours from the Saint Petersburg branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The final section of the catalogue is “Decorative and Applied Art” in which works from the Hermitage stocks created by craftspeople in Western European and the East splendidly supplement the painting section, expanding our conception of 17th-century Flemish art and Baroque-era culture.
The author of the introduction to the catalogue and co-curator of the exhibition, is the head of the State Hermitage’s Department of Western European Fine Art Mikhail Dedinkin. The texts were written by Natalia Gritsai, Tatiana Kosourova, Alisa Mezentseva, Maria Menshikova, Lidia Potochkina and Vladislav Statkevich (State Hermitage), Yekaterina Basargina and Irina Tunkina (Saint Petersburg branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences), Valentina Bubyreva (Saint Petersburg State University). Vadim Sadkov (State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts), and Darya Krasovskaya (New Jerusalem State Museum of History and Art).
The publication is intended for both specialists and the wider art-loving public.
