Blogotional

Meanwhile, back in St. Petersburg, let's spend a couple of days in the Hermitage. Most people do not undestand what the Hermitage really is. It is a five building formerly royal complex consisting of the Winter Palace, the Old Hermitage, the New Hermitage, the Small Hermitage, and the Theater. The palace and the theater should be self-explanitory. A hermitage, in this setting is a royal place of retreat. As a hermit dwells alone, so a hermitage is a building where royalty can escape the comstant push of humanity that their position thrusts upon them. Catherine the Great, who began the Russian Imperial art collection, used the hermitage's existing at the time to house the collection and added one of the buildings to the complex. Once the Romanovs were out and the Sovs were in, the state used the complex as a museum for the collection, along with some of the other collections belonging to the former nobility.

The impressionist collection is enormous. It belonged to some merchants at the time of the revolution and was split between the Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. My wife, a huge impressionist fan, was appalled at the condition the collection was in and how it was cared for. The stuff in the Pushkin (I saw it in '91) is in better shape than this, but not wonderful. This is the third time I have seen impressionism in Russia and the Russians seem to ignore it altogether. Restoration is necessary for many, many paintings in the Hermitage, as well as better display techniques to preserve them, but the impressionists seem to be getting the shortest shrift of all.

This would be El Greco and perhaps the most famous painting in the museum. They have a lot of spanish art, heck, they have a lot of art period. Probabaly the most important thing to note here is that my wife took this picture with a flash. All the pictures you see here, we took. Try that at any other major museum in the world. Oh sure we had to pay an extra $5 for the privilege, but hey. So here is a question for serious discussion, what is more grossly commerical, marketing the image of a painting to put it on every imaginable gee-gaw in the gift store, ala the Chicago Art Institute, or charging people to take pictures so they can make their own gee gaws, or in this case blog posts? Furthermore, when do you think the decendents of these artists are gonna start suing for residuals? I would


Lastly, this is a DaVinci -- this just impressed me no end. This is the only original DaVinci I have ever seen, least 'til I get to the Louvre, and since the Mona Lisa is kind of synonomous with "painting" I figure this is just too cool. (How's that for sounding like an uneducated boorish American redneck in the "arty" museum?) What is impressive is the access one has to such a piece in the Hermitage -- it's just sitting there, no glass and completely approachable.

Tomorrow let's look at a few of the objects (as opposed to paintings in the Hermitage.