Pole-top with a gryphon’s head
Wood, leather. Pazyryk Barrow 2. 5th or 4th century B.C.
19
Bird-like idol
Bronze plate. Chance find from the village of Ust-Kishert, Perm Province
20
Gold bull-calf
Maikop Barrow. 3rd millennium B.C.
21
Chamfron in the shape of a horned tiger and goose
Horn. Pazyryk Barrow 2. 5th or 4th century B.C.
22
Piled rug
Wool. Pazyryk Barrow. 5th century B.C.
23
Stone women
Krasnodar Region. 11th or 12th century
The Department of Classical Antiquity
The Hermitage collection оf Greek and Roman antiquities is one of the largest in the world, and was assembled over a period of almost three hundred years. Interest in the art of Greece and Rome arose in Russia long before the Museum was founded: pieces of sculpture were being bought in Italy on the orders of the Russian court and the nobility in the early years of the eighteenth century. Thus, numerous marble statues, including the famous Venus of Tauris and The Shepherd, were brought into the country during the reign of Peter the Great. Later, most of them found their way into the Museum.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, several collections of cameos and intaglios acquired from the German painter Anton Raffaël Mengs, the Duke of Orleans, and Giovanni Battista Casanova, director of the Dresden Academy of Arts, formed the basis of a magnificent collection of antique gems. The Lyde Browne collection purchased in 1787 included, apart from Roman copies of Greek originals, a superb portrait bust of Philip the Arabian, and portraits of Posthumus and Salonina.
In 1834 the Pizzati collection arrived from Rome, and formed the nucleus of the Hermitage collection of painted vases, bronzes and terra-cottas. In the 1850s the collection of sculpture was greatly enriched by a number of new additions: The Resting Satyr and Athena (by sculptors of Phidias’s circle) from the collection of the Urals industrialists, the Demidovs; and forty-six sculptures from the Laval collection, including a magnificent bust of the Emperor Balbinus.
In 1861—62 the Hermitage acquired a large part of the fabulous Campana collection — 787 items, comprising a large number of Italic vases, bronzes and sculptures. Suffice it to say that these accessions included the monumental statue of Jupiter and a beautiful sculpture of Athena, known as Athena Campana. Many of the vases in the collection had been skilfully restored, and some of them even reconstructed, but in those days their authenticity was not questioned. It was only after thorough investigation that scholars have managed to identify the original parts and restore the authentic designs. In 1884 the Museum received a group of Tanagra statuettes and carved gems from Piotr Saburov, the Russian ambassador to Berlin.
The actual composition of the collection is largely a result of the way in which it was assembled. On the one hand, the personal taste of the agents entrusted with purchasing art works at European sales played a considerable role; on the other, the artistic interests of the royal family and the nobility who followed in its footsteps, were not to be neglected. This explains the great wealth of certain sections (gems, vases, Roman portrait sculptures), and the relative incompleteness of others. From around the turn of the century fewer and fewer works were purchased abroad, partly because a new, very important source of materials had appeared with the beginning of excavations in the south of Russia in the 1830s. Diverse art objects were discovered in the necropoli of Greek colonies founded on the Black Sea coast from the sixth century B.C. onwards. These finds soon became known all over the world, and have proved exceptionally valuable to archaeologists since, coming as they do from such rich burials as those of the Semibratny (Seven Brothers’), the Bolshaya Bliznitsa, Artiukhovsky and Kul-Oba Barrows, they can be dated with a fair degree of accuracy.
After the October Revolution of 1917, a number of decrees were issued by the Government for the purpose of protecting the artistic heritage of the young Soviet Republic. In accordance with these decrees, artistic and historic monuments were registered, private collections nationalized, and the export of objects of artistic and historic value was discontinued.
Many private collections (those of the Shuvalovs, the Stroganovs, Botkin, and Nelidova, among others) passed to the State Museum Reserve and thence to the Hermitage. The Department of Greek and Roman antiquities was thereby greatly enriched, the new additions including some genuine pearls of classical art, such as the Attic red-figure vase which earned its creator the title of the Shuvalov Painter.
Simultaneously a fundamental reorganization of the research and exhibition work of the Department was undertaken. A purely decorative approach to display was abandoned and complex exhibitions were arranged, based on the chronological principle. Through the careful study of the works, revision of dating, exclusion of fakes, and removal of roughly restored objects, it became possible to present a fairly accurate picture of the development of classical art and the material and spiritual culture of classical antiquity.
Today, the collection is being expanded by materials acquired in two main ways: first, from systematic archaeological excavations being carried out by the Hermitage in Berezan Island (near Ochakov), at Nymphaeum (near Kerch), and Ghersonesus (near Sevastopol); second, by the purchase of collections and individual works from private owners. Thus, in the 1950s and 1960s, the Purchasing Commission of the Hermitage bought over a hundred items from the collector Ivan Tolstoy, a professor of classical philology. They included interesting terracottas, vases, marble busts, and ancient glassware.
The Hermitage has an extremely rich and diverse collection of pottery. A jug from Temir Gora, a Berezan amphora with a group of komasts, and other works of Rhodian-Ionian provenance, discovered on the northern Black Sea coast, are the pride of the collection. The specimens brought to light in large numbers during excavations in Berezan Island permitted Soviet scholars not only to make a thorough investigation of the class of pottery to which they belong, but also to posit Miletus as the possible origin of one group of East Ionian vessels.
From the study of an extensive collection of Corinthian pottery, including many items also found on the northern Black Sea coast, it has been possible to identify new groups of works and attribute them to conventionally named artists, and to revise certain ideas, hitherto current in literature, concerning the economic links between the Bosporan area and Corinth.
The collection of Attic pottery is quite substantial. The black-figure vases feature objects painted by pupils of Exekias, some pieces by the Amasis Painter displaying the decorative elegance characteristic of his manner, and several examples of the subtle work produced by Psiax. There is also a collection of Little-Master cups, whose number is constantly being increased by new finds from Berezan Island.
Epictetos, Euphronios, Douris, and the Brygos Painter are among the famous names to paint red-figure vases. Many potters and artists, however, did not sign their works. Nevertheless, practically all the Attic vases that have survived can be divided according to their stylistic features into certain groups ascribed to one artist and named conventionally after their most representative specimen. We have thus the vases of the Shuvalov Painter, the Pan Painter (after a krater now in Boston), the Penelope Painter (after a skyphos depicting her, now in Munich), and others. One of the masterpieces of red-figure vase painting, conventionally called “Vase with a Swallow”, is also attributed to an anonymous artist.