The Hermitage guide

Among the outstanding Greek sculptors of the fourth century B.C., the works of Praxiteles and Lysippos are best represented in the Hermitage. We can form an idea of Praxiteles’ artistic idiom from the copies of his famous Eros and Resting Satyr while we can learn about Lysippos from the copies of his Eros Stringing the Bow and Herakles Slaying the Lion of Nemea, one of a series of sculptures depicting the Twelve Labours of Herakles. Although the Hermitage has no works that can be directly associated with the creations of Skopas, it does possess fine copies of several sculptures which were strongly influenced by this great master and contain unmistakable features of his style. These include Herakles with the Golden Apples of the Hesperides, and Head of a Poet, one of the masterpieces of the Department.

The Museum has a small but varied collection of Hellenistic sculpture. The early stage of its development, for example, is represented by the Portrait of Menander, a copy of an original ascribed to Kephisodotos and Timarchos. The consummate skill with which it is executed ensures it a special place among the numerous copies of this portrait of the dramatist who was so popular with the Romans. Oleg Waldhauer, an authority on the art of antiquity, identified two sculptured heads as fragments of copies of the famous compositions from Pergamum, Menelaos with the Body of Patrokles and The Dying Gaul (from a series of votive sculptures of Attalus I).

The Venus of Tauris is world famous. The Roman imitator lost none of the charm of the Greek original. Hellenistic influence is also seen in Roman copies of sculptures of children, which served as funerary monuments or as offerings to temples.

The Hermitage has a superb collection of Roman portrait busts, including several works of world renown. The art of portraiture in the period from the first to the third century is illustrated by a wide range of work reflecting different stages in the development of Roman art at the time of its flowering.

The sculpture of the reign of Augustus (31 B.C. — A.D. 14) and his successors is represented by portraits of members of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, and by those of private persons. A comparison of these two varieties reveals the distinctive features of the official dynastic portrait whose purpose was to assert the right of the imperial family to rule and to inherit power, and to be deified as objects of the imperial cult. These features are expressed with equal clarity in the sculptures of Augustus and Liviá, and in the bust of the young Gaius Caesar. The general tendency to emulate the classical art of Greece led to a certain amount of idealization in sculpture. The Classicism of the Augustan Age did not, however, exclude verisimilitude. In the portrait of Livia, for instance, the face is carved in a broad, generalized manner, dispensing with details and signs of age, yet at the same time clearly delineating her characteristic features: the eyes set wide apart, the thin, somewhat hooked nose, and the small well-shaped mouth.

The portrait sculpture of the second half of the first century, under the Flavians (A.D. 69—96), is represented in the Hermitage only by female portraits, which nevertheless vividly reflect the new stylistic idiom — its verisimilitude, its monumentality, and its massive forms. The specific features of Flavian art are also patent in such later work as Head of a Dacian, part of a statue that is thought to have decorated an arch in the Forum of the Emperor Trajan (A.D. 98—117). While this work can hardly be considered a portrait, the exact depiction of the ethnic traits of the model and the high degree of individualization are most unusual in a decorative sculpture.

Most representative for the reign of Hadrian (A.D. 117—138) are not the portraits of this emperor but a portrait of Antinous, in which the individual features of the young man’s face are idealized according to the canons of Greek art.