On 31 August 2024, the Small Hermitage was the setting for a celebratory event organized by the State Hermitage and T-Bank. During the evening a new joint project was presented – the conservation of Jan Provoost’s painting The Virgin Mary in Glory.
It is planned that work on the conservation of The Virgin Mary in Glory, a gem in the collection of 15th- and 16th-century Netherlandish painting will be completed by the end of 2024. The museum will be producing unique digital art tokens based on the results of the process.
“We have
a splendid collection of Netherlandish painting, but it is not very well
conserved. That is in point of fact the task of a museum, because masterpieces
are born thanks to the work of restorers and curators. In themselves they are
not always masterpieces – they need to be shown to be masterpieces. Conservation
is a major, important scientific task, and as such we nowadays greatly prize
every opportunity of this kind.
“Conservation
is also bound up with one more remarkable amusement and that is NFTs,
digitization, which we engage in together with Interros and T-Bank. Now we are
producing conservation tokens. Before conservation, a piece has a certain appearance;
after conservation that appearance disappears. When you record a painting in
the course of conservation, you obtain something that no longer exists –
it will disappear,” Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, commented.
The history of The Virgin Mary in Glory was told in greater detail by Nikolai Zykov, deputy head of the State Hermitage’s Department of Western European Fine Art. His account was supplemented by a film about the conservation of the painting.
After the official part of the event was over, the guests went for a walk around the museum. Accompanied by professional guides, they acquainted themselves with works of art from the Low Countries in the Hermitage collection, viewed the famous Peacock Clock and the Kolyvan Vase.
Alexei Malinovsky, Chairman of the Board of T-Bank, thanked the museum for organizing the occasion: “The opportunity to be here today within the walls of the
Hermitage when no-one else is here, outside of working hours, is an incredible
emotion that I am feeling, and I hope that you share with me the same emotional
mood. It is something one will remember for life.”
More about the conservation
