On 8 June 2024, the exhibition “ ‘The Best in His Art’ Andrey Mitrokhin – the Founding Father of the School of Painting Conservation at the Hermitage” begins its run in the Picket Hall of the Winter Palace. The display is devoted to the activities of Andrey Filippovich Mitrokhin (1765–1845), the first Russian specialist to have had a major influence on the development of restoration at the Hermitage and, as a consequence, in Russia generally.
The exhibition presents 16 paintings by artists of various European schools dating from the 15th–17th centuries that were restored by Mitrokhin, as well as the sole work known to have been painted by Andrey Filippovich himself – a Portrait of Emperor Paul I. Visitors will be able to acquaint themselves with archive documents relating to the master’s life and activities, to examine an electronic resource with depictions of all the paintings that he restored and see tools used by 19th-century restorers.
The exhibition features works restored using the technique known as transposition. This involves transferring the paint layer of a work together with the primer below onto a new support, most often canvas, more rarely copper. The transposition technique required extreme precision, total concentration and great inventiveness from the person carrying it out.
Mitrokhin, who served as a restorer in the Imperial Hermitage from 1801 to 1845, was a perfect exponent of transposition technique and performed it on more than 90 works from the Hermitage Picture Gallery. Those included paintings by Raphael, Filippino Lippi, Jacob van Ruisdael, Giulio Romano, David Teniers the Younger, Rubens, Rembrandt, Anthony van Dyck, Nicolas Poussin and Lorenzo Lotto.
The works that Mitrokhin restored without transposition number in the hundreds. It is difficult to give a total, as he did not perform some of the work personally, but with the participation of assistants and pupils. Towards the middle of the 19th century, transposition became an increasingly large-scale practice. The technique had been successfully mastered, to a large extent thanks to Andrey Mitrokhin who became head of Russia’s first school of restoration, organized under the auspices of the Hermitage. Under his leadership, graduates of the Academy of Arts received training. That made it possible to achieve continuity between generations of restorers as well as developing a methodology in technique and painting.
Besides the works featured in the exhibition, visitors will have the opportunity to see the paintings restored by Andrey Mitrokhin that are in the Hermitage’s permanent display. Until 8 September 2024 special labels will be placed alongside those pictures with QR codes linking to the temporary exhibition. By using those, visitors will be able to study a guide-plan of the other halls containing pictures restored by means of the transposition technique.
A film has been prepared for the exhibition showing the transposition technique and an illustrated scholarly catalogue in Russian produced: “Perveishii v svoem iskusstve. Andrey Mitrokhin – osnovatel’ ermitazhnoi shkoly restavratsii zhivopisi (State Hermitage Publishing House, St Petersburg, 2024)
The exhibition curators are Irina Guruleva, Deputy Head of the State Hermitage’s Department for Scientific Restoration and Conservation, and Nikolai Zykov, Deputy Head of the Department of Western European Fine Art.
More about the exhibition
Restoration and conservation at the Hermitage might be reckoned to be as old as the museum itself. Catherine II’s acquisition of art collections produced a need to recruit painters and craftsmen to improve their condition. As in many other spheres of artistic life, in the early stages professional restoration in this country was indebted to specialists invited from abroad and artists of foreign origin. Those included the restorer Lucas Conrad Pfandzelt and the painters Carl-Ludwig Johann Christineck, Heinrich Buchholz and B. Peronard. Native specialists played only a lesser role up until a certain point in time.
The first Russian to have a major influence on the development of restoration in his homeland would be Andrey Filippovich Mitrokhin (1765–1845). He was born in the town of Toropets in Tver province, where he trained under the local artist and icon-painter Gavrila Lokhov. Mitrokhin was taken on at the Imperial Hermitage in 1801. For the next few years, he studied the works of Western artists and painting technique, then in 1808 he began working on restoration. Mitrokhin served in the Hermitage almost to the very end of his life. It was only in 1845 that he was released from his position, while remaining attached to the museum as a supernumerary.
Andrey Mitrokhin is known above all as the restorer who was the first in Russia to master and introduce the technique of transposition. This involves transferring the paint layer of a work together with the primer below onto a new support, most often canvas, more rarely copper. Sometimes paintings would also be transferred from an old canvas to a new one. Up until the 15th century, pictures were mainly executed on a wooden panel, but that kind of support was vulnerable to a variety of deterioration due to unstable climatic conditions, as well as the harmful effect of woodworm and the like. This led to the timber becoming distorted, dried out and cracked, while insects ate away at the support, making it brittle. In the first half of the 18th century, people in Italy came up with the idea of transposing paintings and began to carry it out. It was, however, in France that the technique started to be used extensively, and the peak of its usage came in 19th-century Russia.
The first transposition that we know to have been carried out by Mitrokhin dates back to 1811. It was Camillo Filippi’s Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, believed at that time to be a work by Garofalo. From the second half of the 1810s, Mitrokhin’s restoration activities grew more intensive. He worked on paintings by artists of the Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Flemish, English, French and German schools. Today, it is possible to list more than 90 pictures that Mitrokhin transferred from one support to another. The subsequent fates of those paintings have varied, but the majority are still in the Hermitage collection.
Andrey Filippovich Mitrokhin is justly considered the founder of the Hermitage school of painting conservation – a school as an educational institution and as a body of scholarly knowledge, views and mastery of practical techniques. Mitrokhin was not the first Russian restorer, but he was the person who assimilated all the highly complex technologies of mechanical restoration in his own time and introduced new materials and methods that are still being used today. Thanks to Mitrokhin, a tradition of continuity of experience formed in the Hermitage when knowledge and practical skills are passed on to younger colleagues.
