The Hermitage [antikvár]

This book introduces the reader to the highlights of the Hermitage collection — works by painters of the past, from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century. Paintings by Old Masters Giotto and Rembrandt, El Greco and Watteau, Van Eyck and Rubens. Where does the borderline between old and new painting lie? According to tradition, modern history begins with the English Revolution; in the history of painting it is the French Revolution that may be regarded as the beginning of the new era. The innovations introduced into painting in the nineteenth century developed further in the twentieth century. In 1904, the celebrated Russian poet, Valery Eriusov, wrote the poem Little Lamps, symbolically representing each era in art history by a certain colour or light: Centuries — little lamps! How you are stretched in the darkness Through our brains, along the solid thread of time! Diverse flames, you beguile the eye. Lamps are burning; some brightly, some dimly. The age of Dante is a mysterious glimmer, ominously gold. 0 Leonardo, your azure radiance! The earliest painting in this book, The Crucifix by Ugolino di Tedice, dates from the second half of the thirteenth century, the age of Dante, "the last poet of the Middle Ages and the first poet of the new era". The thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries were dominated by the Italian Proto-Renaissance, which, although still firmly linked with the past, was already giving birth to new forms that anticipated the great revolution in the history of humanity — the Renaissance. Dante's contemporary, another great Florentine, Giotto, was accordingly the last painter of the medieval period and the first painter of the modern. It is not without reason that he is often referred to as the father of Western European painting. It is from liis art that Western European Renaissance painting inherited its interest in reality and its new vision and interpretation of the world. At the same time it was not until the fifteenth century that Giotto's artistic innovations were understood and developed to tlieir fullest potential. Valery Briusov's image of the age of Dante, as applied to art, is not completely accurate: the painting of the trecento can hardly be described as ominous; "gold", on the other hand, is an epithet which comes by itself with a glance at trecento paintings. 5