The museum shows people virtual reality and gets them to believe in it. Looking at a picture, we do to some extent immerse ourselves in the world that it is telling about.
A few days ago, I was in Kazan. The Games of the Future were opening there, a project that combines digital technologies with physical activity, classic and digital forms of sport.
The Games of the Future is an innovative combination of the virtual and the real. People play virtual football or ice-hockey and then go out on the pitch and play the real thing. They live simultaneously in the real world and the virtual, transitioning from one to the other. Avatars are also present at the competitions – figures of well-known people created in the virtual world: Confucius, Sofya Kovalevskaya. At the Hermitage, in the exhibition devoted to Leonardo, there is also an avatar. Leonardo da Vinci comes out and explains why the paintings that we are showing were made by him and his pupils. That might seem like a challenge to the classic museum, but it has become something commonplace. The Musée d’Orsay had a Van Gogh exhibition where an avatar of the artist answered questions. They say it did make mistakes but knew Van Gogh’s biography very well.
The interplay with the virtual sphere is an important part of the museum. The museum shows people virtual reality and gets them to believe in it. Looking at a picture, we do to some extent immerse ourselves in the world that it is telling about.
It just so happened that on the same day that the Games of the Future started, the exhibition “Believe not thine eyes!” opened at the Hermitage–Kazan Centre. We held a similar one at the Hermitage. In Kazan it is slightly different.
The exhibition is about illusions – the device in art when a depiction seeks to appear three-dimensional. You get the impression that you could touch it. There is a famous example – a fly sitting on a painting that seems so real you want to brush it away. The same approach is being used when a wooden clock seems to be made of bronze, glass objects look like porcelain… We are fond of exhibiting snuffboxes from Empress Elizabeth’s time. They are made of porcelain but have the look of a letter with a wax seal. We have paintings where the appearance of a curtain makes you want to throw it back. A picture like that became the main one on the cover of the exhibition catalogue.
People often forget that the leading illusion is the Raphael Loggias in the Hermitage. Catherine had a virtual image of them created on canvas. We are travelling through loggias that are long since gone. The ones in the Vatican are very different, far less grand looking.
We are talking here about illusionism as a part of artistic creativity.
In the Gallery of Ancient Painting in the Hermitage there is a famous episode. The artist Zeuxis depicted a boy and grapes. Birds flew down and started to peck at the grapes. Everyone is enchanted: grapes like the real thing. The artist is disappointed: “What’s good about that?” The birds are not afraid of the boy – that means he is depicted poorly. A problem that constantly torments artists. Are they creating reality or imitating it?
The exhibition in Kazan is a large one. It is accompanied by many inventive ideas. Of course, an illusion works when you are prepared to be deceived. Ordinary lighting is no good for a display like that. You need semidarkness and mirrors. Then a cardboard figure – an illusion standing in front of the fireplace –might seem to be a living person. There are many deceptions of other kinds too there.
The Hermitage in Kazan is famed for its tactile stations: texts written in Braille, little pictures, moving objects.
In the General Staff building there is a large stone table – an illusion featuring depictions of sea creatures and shells. It seems as if the water is real; you want to touch it. No-one would transport that table very far. In Kazan they made a large virtual table on which you can touch and move everything. On the one hand, it is a game, on the other, a meditation on whether the world that we see is real or born of our imagination. Perhaps it has been foisted upon us by those who create the image.
What we call the Celestial Hermitage on the Internet is a virtual world that expands the bounds of such a trend in museum life as inclusion.
Inclusion is the ability to make things accessible to those for whom they are inaccessible for various reasons. Everything begins for the sake of people who have special needs – those who have trouble seeing, hearing… But new opportunities appear for many other people too. For those who have trouble coming to Saint Petersburg, we show the museum on the Internet. Virtual technologies help those who are not familiar with classical mythology or not used to grasping complex matters – philosophy – in a picture.
The exhibition “New Secrets of Leonardo’s Paintings” also used new technologies to good effect, although it is might seem to be a classic exhibition. It is devoted to a pressing issue of the day – authorship.
When we are talking about the virtual world, artificial intelligence, we realize that authorship there is collective. It is difficult to work out just who did what there. The question of authorship always existed in classic art. As for the attribution of Rembrandt, Leonardo and the like… Now it is the latest technologies in particular that are providing the opportunity to study works painstakingly, to restore them painstakingly and to see the artist’s distinctive characteristics. To attempt to understand what part of a painting is by a single hand, where there were two or three at work. Thanks to the latest technologies we can work through an enormous quantity of material, read things when it was previously impossible, and find the one name we are seeking. There is much to be discovered in archives. And that is what happened.
It turns out that besides the two known versions of The Virgin of the Rocks, Leonardo’s oeuvre includes a third. There is a similar-looking picture in the Russian collection of the Museum of Christian Culture, together with which we created this exhibition. The hypothesis arose thanks to the work of specialists from the Hermitage and Italy.
We can take a fresh look at old art. Today Leonardo is a fashionable subject for this. There was a time when all good paintings were attributed to him. That is how Catherine bought them for the Hermitage as well. Then came a moment when many paintings were stripped of Leonardo’s authorship. The same happened with Rembrandt at one time. Now the tide is beginning to turn. Here and there, thanks to new technologies, new approaches to restoration and research, paintings by Leonardo are being discovered.
There is the well-known story of the painting Salvator Mundi, which was considered one of many copies. Then it was examined and restored, and people decided there is a large amount from Leonardo in it. Some of the world’s most authoritative museums confirmed his authorship. Then there is also the main criterion for people nowadays – the auction price. The painting has been sold and resold for crazy sums of money – an indication that many were convinced that it is a Leonardo. Meanwhile many were not.
Authorship is a relative matter. We do not know everything about AI. When it comes to Rubens, though, we also know that he had a studio working for him. Titian’s Mary Magdalene hangs in the Hermitage. There are at least six such works worldwide. Things like that were replicated; assistants helped the artist to paint them. Soon we will have an exhibition about Flemish still lifes. Those were always painted by several artists. One did houses, another flowers, a third animals and a fourth the human being. You can make that out.
We have produced exhibition-discussions devoted to the question of authorship several times now. There was “Fabergé, Jeweller to the Imperial Court”. Currently the exhibition “Sèvres Porcelain and Imitations. From Adoration to Deceit” has brought together authentic porcelain, imitations and counterfeits.
Now the argument is about the presence of Leonardo’s hand in paintings.
There is a known artistic phenomenon – the Leonardeschi, that is the school of Leonardo, his splendid pupils. He was constantly experimenting; his artistic devices are an example of illusionism. The Giaconda’s smile is invented; you’ll not find one like that in life. The different ways the infants’ fingers turn in the painting is a device that can be learnt. His pupils adopted and used them. Leonardo helped them. Now specialists are learning to distinguish between what he did himself and what the pupils did.
There are three pictures in the exhibition. The Hermitage one – an Angel – has always been considered to belong to the school of Leonardo. Now Italian colleagues are going to study it. They fancy that there is a lot of Leonardo in it. I don’t know. We shall see.
The Battle of Anghiari was a celebrated mural in Florence that has not survived. Several variants do exist, either sketches for it or copies of it. Not one of them is acknowledged to be entirely by Leonardo. Regarding the picture from the Museum of Christian Culture, researchers suggest that it is the original composition created by the hand of Leonardo. We are operating with degrees of probability. I state with great caution that the hand of Leonardo may be present in the work. Art historians speak noncommittally. Restorers are more positively minded. A discussion is underway. The Hermitage can permit itself that.
We are showing items from the collection of the Museum of Christian Culture. It is a private collection of Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant art: icons, Antiquity, Rembrandt, Leonardo, works by their circles. An interesting phenomenon in itself.
There was a time when major museums around the world did not exhibit private collections. Russian museums even back in Soviet times did hold exhibitions of Western private collections. They were something new in the museum world. Then it became the vogue. Exhibitions are held, but the separation between private and museum persists.
It must be said that some huge private art collections have appeared in Russia. A few have got stuck in the West, but the majority are here. Our present-day Tretyakovs, Shchukins and Morozovs already exist somewhere. Museums are opening their doors to them, collaborating with them. Still, it needs to be understood that the interaction should be properly constructed.
There is a difference between a gallery and a museum. A gallery, as a rule, is a commercial enterprise. It trades, changes its stocks. A museum is a single whole – that is inscribed in law. Its collections are indivisible. Whether Leonardo painted the picture or not will not change anything in the museum. For a gallery, it means a difference in price. People sue when the authorship of their possessions is called into doubt. They lose money if someone says that their Picasso is not a Picasso, their Matisse not a Matisse. We have seen controversies over such matters repeatedly.
Private collections ought to be supported. They should not, however, be allowed to grow and spread like weeds in a field or have “hothouses” constructed for them. We are cultivating an orderly garden, one in which state and private museums can interact. That arrangement is being worked out.
This material was published in the Sankt-Petersburgskie Vedomosti newspaper, №36 (7612) on 28 February 2024 with the headline “The Interplay with the Virtual Sphere”
