The Hermitage guide

It is also Liphart to whom the Hermitage owes its second Da Vinci masterpiece, The Benois Madonna. This picture had been in the collection of Sapozhnikov, an Astrakhan businessman, since the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was, however, only in 1908 that the work was identified as an early Leonardo. Liphart needed all his perseverance to refute doubts concerning the picture’s authenticity and to secure its purchase from the Benois collection in 1914.

The Great October Revolution opened up new vistas before the Hermitage. As a result of the policy laid down by the state for the preservation of the country’s art treasures, numerous works of art were handed over to the Museum following the nationalization of private collections.

Especially important additions came to the section of applied art from the former royal palaces in Tsarskoye Selo and from the Petrograd mansions of the nobility: the Sheremetevs, Yusupovs, Bobrinskys, Kochubeis, Dolgorukys, and Paskevich. This section also incorporated several large private and museum collections. Most valuable for the Hermitage were that of Botkin, the Russian artist and archaeologist (which included exceptionally fine specimens of medieval and Renaissance art) ; a selection of exhibits from the so-called Koniushenny Museum (Museum of the Imperial Stables), which housed coaches and carriages of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and some rare Gobelin tapestries; the collection of the Museum of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, and the famous collection of the Stieglitz Museum. The latter collection contained remarkable samples of fifteenth- to nineteenth-century furniture, first-rate specimens of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Flemish, German and French tapestry, and a variety of objects in glass, majolica, bone, ivory, and metal. These sources also enriched the Hermitage collection of Western European porcelain, which is represented today by articles from the world’s renowned factories of Meissen, Sèvres, Berlin, Copenhagen, and Vienna, as well as from private and provincial factories. The collections of textiles, embroideries, and other kinds of applied art were enlarged too.

Equally notable was the expansion of the section of drawings which in the nineteenth century had benefited only from the acquisition of minor collections and through donations. Now it came to incorporate the rich collections of graphic works once owned by the Yusupovs, Mordvinovs, and the Stieglitz Museum, as well as the choice collection of S. Yaremich and the finer part of drawings from the Museum of the Academy of Arts. Among the materials from the latter was the Betskoi collection which had been kept in the Academy since 1768 and had gradually fallen into oblivion to be rediscovered only after 1917. The high artistic standard of this collection can be judged by Group Portrait of the Family of the Dukes d’Este by Ercole dei Roberti and Virgin and Child by Albrecht Dürer.

Among the accretions made to the section of Western European sculpture after 1917, the most noteworthy were the above-mentioned Farsetti collection, transferred to the Hermitage from the Museum of the Academy of Arts; the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century German and Netherlandish wooden sculptures, and French and Italian bronzes, which came from the museums of the Stieglitz School and the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts; works by Aristide Maillol, Franz Stuck, Max Klinger, and other masters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as sculptures by Étienne-Maurice Falconet, Jean-Antoine Houdon, and Auguste Rodin, all of which were received from the Museum of New Western Art in Moscow. Today the Hermitage collection of sculpture numbers over two thousand items, covering the period from the Middle Ages down to the present day. The collection continues to expand. During recent years, for example, it has been enriched with three works by Matisse, The Large Tragic Mask of Beethoven by Bourdelle, and many other pieces.