A new virtual tour is now available on the State Hermitage website – “...and let us make us a name...”. Tobias Verhaecht’s Tower of Babel – based on the exhibition that ran in the Apollo Hall of the Winter Palace from 27 March to 23 June 2024.
A new virtual tour is now available on the State Hermitage website – “...and let us make us a name...”. Tobias Verhaecht’s Tower of Babel – based on the exhibition that ran in the Apollo Hall of the Winter Palace from 27 March to 23 June 2024.
The virtual tour provides a unique opportunity to immerse yourself even after its closure in the atmosphere of an exhibition that tells the unusual story of a single painting and casts light on the origins and evolution of the biblical account of the building of the Tower of Babel.
Among the works of the 17th-century Flemish school that depict the Tower of Babel, the painting in the State Hermitage collection occupies a special place. For a long time, it was considered to be by an unknown master. The conservation and art-historical research carried out in the Hermitage in 2017–24 made it possible to give the painting back the names of its creators. The previously anonymous masterpiece proved to be the work of the Flemish painter Tobias Verhaecht and was produced with the participation of his no less well-known contemporaries – Jan Bruegel the Elder, Hendrick de Clerck and Abel Grimmer. The completion of the conservation of the painting of The Tower of Babel made it possible to fully appreciate its exceptional artistic merits and to establish the authorship of the work for the first time in the more than 200 years it has spent in palaces and museums.
As well as this centrepiece of the exhibition, the virtual tour features works of European painting, graphic, numismatic and applied art from the 16th to 21st centuries devoted to the biblical legend of the raising of the Tower of Babel and the perception of its philosophical meaning by artists and scholars in various countries and eras. Particularly striking are artefacts from Babylon at the time of Nebuchadnezzar II, the ruler who built the ziggurat (temple in the form of a stepped pyramid) that became the prototype for the Tower of Babel.
The publication of the virtual tour on the Hermitage website has been timed to mark an important date – the Day of Remembrance of 8 September 1941, the start of the Siege of Leningrad, since the story of Tobias Verhaecht’s Tower of Babel is closely bound up with the events of the Great Patriotic War.
The virtual tour contains four spherical panoramas, each supplemented by written commentaries, and a film. Media materials and info-markers on the exhibits tell in detail about their context and the stories connected with them.
The exhibition curators are Anna Nikolayevna Aponasenko, Maxim Vadimovich Lapshin and Alisa Alexandrovna Mezentseva.
