The Hermitage houses a very large collection of Renaissance-era and Impressionist paintings, mostly located in long halls above the throne rooms that occupy much of the ground floor of the main building in the palace complex.
At some point, were I to live forever, I would dearly love to take the seven-year tour of the Hermitage. Even then, I suspect I wouldn’t be able to fully appreciate everything it has to offer, but I bet there are quite a few real treasures hidden in amongst the tacky bits and the bits that have gold all over them–but I repeat myself.
The main floor also houses the only Michelangelo in the Hermitage’s collection, this unfinished statue that had been commissioned by some church dude or other and then left half-completed when said church dude changed his mind and decided he wanted something else entirely. (I’ve had clients do that to me, and it’s enough to provoke a murderous rage even when I haven’t invested hundreds of man-hours into chipping away at gigantic blocks of stone with tiny hand tools.)
After being bitten and infected with the stone virus, he waits. Quietly, day after day, year after year, he waits. When the stars are right, and the hold of the virus weakens, he will drag himself free of his marble prison. Then he will shamble across the great halls of the museum at night, needing only the blood of the living to remove the curse and fuel his unholy desire for vengeance. On that day, they will pay, the ones who kept him caged here behind ropes of red velvet, a curiosity to attract the throngs of tourists. Oh, yes. They will pay.
This next sculpture has an interesting tale behind it, which lives on as a warning to artists of all stripes.
It was intended to illustrate a popular story about a dolphin who befrended a boy. Every day, so the story goes, the dolphin and the boy would play together in the water, venturing farther and farther away from shore as they frolicked in the salt spray beneath the warm sun.
Inevitably, of course, the dolphin’s knowledge of human physiology failed him, and he misjudged the length of time the boy could hold his breath, with the predictable result that the boy drowned. The dolphin was so devastated by this that he bore the boy away on his back until he, too, died, of loneliness or grief or syphilis or something.
Now, the first thing the astute visitor might notice upon seeing this sculpture is that there is no dolphin in it. The thing carrying the boy here looks like nothing so much as Daffy Duck suffering from ‘roid rage, with his body replaced by that of some horrifying half-fish abomination from the depths of the sunken city of R’lyeh.
This is because, apparently, the artist who carved this sculpture had never heard of a “dolphin” before, and knew nothing about them save for the fact that they were big and lived in the ocean, and they fed on the souls of mortal men whenever the planets aligned themselves properly in the night sky.
I seriously don’t know how the human race accomplished anything before Google and Wikipedia. Where did people go if they needed to know what a dolphin looked like, or who that really hot guest star was in that one episode of Star Trek: Voyager when they thought they had found their way back to the Alpha Quadrant, and then at the last minute it turned out they didn’t?
Strange Daffy Duck/fish-thing hybrid properly admired, we headed upstairs to the galleries above. Even the stairways in the place are richly decorated. No, scratch that. Even the minor secondary stairways are decorated with the most ostentatious, gaudy, over-the-top kind of junk you can possibly imagine. Like this statue in the stairway up to the second-floor exhibit halls, for example.
At least I hope that’s a statue. Don’t blink! They are fast, faster than you could believe. And they can throw a mean laurel wreath.
I found an open window on the top floor that looked out into the courtyard of the palace complex and some of the buildings behind. And I thought Portland was gray and rainy…
That huge, sprawling, elongated building I posted a picture of earlier? Yeah, that was only one building in the complex. Catherine actually lived here.
Our tour guide whose Name Can Not Be Uttered abandoned us to wander the artwork in the halls, partly so she could take a phone call. From a lover, I suspect, judging from her body language and the huge grin on her face when her phone rang. I don’t speak a word of Russian, but just her expressions alone suggest to me that she may have been having phone sex with whoever was on the other side. But I digress.
One of the first bits of artwork in the upper halls is this Rembrandt, showing an angel stopping Abraham from sacrificing his son Isaac. He actually painted two versions of this piece (and several sketches and at least one etching), one of which hangs at the Hermitage.
This story has always disturbed me, even back in the days when I was actually Christian. Seriously, what kind of god tests a person’s faith by telling that person to murder his son? Surely an omniscient god already knows what the outcome will be, so the test itself seems like an exercise in petty cruelty.
But more to the point, what kind of person hears voices saying “sacrifice your son” and actually does it? Nowadays, we lock people like that up, and rightly so. Leaving aside for a moment how profoundly fucked up it is to murder your children because the voices in your head tell you to, and even going with the notion that the voice telling you to do this profoundly fucked-up thing is in fact the voice of god or some god-like supernatural entity, the cold and inescapable fact is that any god that tells you to murder your kids is not a god worth worshipping. Not at any price.
Even if he says “Haha! Just kidding!” when you actually go to do the deed.
A lot of artists of the time painted with religious themes. In some ways, artists have it easier than writers. Language is a living, breathing thing, and changes all the time; William Shakespeare is one of the very few people who I can truly say really is as brilliant as everyone says he is, in spite of the number of folks who tell you that he really is brilliant.
But Shakespeare gets a bit of a bad rap in part because the language makes him less accessible to modern readers. He really was the Quentin Tarantino of his day–witty, vulgar, more than a little bit crass, given to bad puns, and obsessed with Uma Thurman–but he seems very stuffy and highbrow to modern high-school students because time has weathered his words and made his particular brand of humor less visible.
Artists don’t have to deal with that. They paint a picture and it’s done. No matter what language the audience speaks, a picture is a picture.
At least to a certain extent. The visual language of art changes, true. But more importantly, the social context changes. Artists tell a story, and that story assumes a cultural framework understood by both the painter and the audience.
With religious themes, it’s a gimme. Someone can paint a picture of Moses coming down off the mountain and two thousand years later people will still understand the reference, because religious memes tend to stick like glue. But sometimes, even the cultural references change, and that’s a dangerous thing. When the cultural framework changes, and the audience becomes disconnected from the artist, the audience may tend to invent their own story.
And when that happens, things can get weird.
The story I put to this picture probably isn’t what the artist intended at all. I’m sure this refers to some kind of myth or fable or something that all the people he was painting for immediately understood, but me? I got nothin’. The story I put on this painting goes something like this:
Dude with wings: Look! I have wings. Let me fondle your breast.
Blonde chick in the dress: My, you do have wings! And what long and…feathery wings they are. I hear that big wings means a big…why yes, of course you may fondle my breast!
Cherub-looking thing: Ooh, look! Someone left a bow just lying around down here.
Effeminate-looking dude in the robe: Look at my fine wares! They are fine and…um, wares. I, too, wish to fondle your breast.
Cherub-looking thing: Dude, seriously, free bow! Just lying on the ground! It’s a bit too big for me, but still.
Blonde chick in the dress: Do you have a big…toga?
Effeminate-looking dude in the robe: Alas, my toga is of undistinguished size. Dare I say, pedestrian, even.
Cherub-looking thing: Of course, this bow has no bowstring…
Blonde chick in the dress: Then you may not fondle my breast. Girl’s gotta have her standards.
Dude with wings: Sorry, dude. Playaz play, losers lose.
Blonde chick in the dress: Come, fly me to the top of that building back there and I will give myself to you in ways that will make Abraham kick a hole in a cinder-block wall.
Cherub-looking thing: Forget the breasts for a minute. Free bow down here. Right down here!
This next painting…well, I’ve had weekends that look like this.
Of course, the weekends I’ve had like this, the people up for auction were there ’cause they wanted to be. Take out that element and it gets pretty messed up, you know what I mean?
And speaking of messed up, the Hermitage is home to a Rembrandt which, try as I might, I could not get a good picture of to save my life. This pic is taken from Wikipedia:
Back in 1985, a guy came into the Hermitage and threw acid all over this painting, doing so much damage that it took restorers eleven years to fix it. When asked why he’d done it, he explained that public depictions of nudity were obscene and pornographic, and he wanted to help purify the world or make it safe for children or some such thing.
Which is pretty messed up, in my book. I’m not quite sure how we go about making people so ashamed of their own bodies that they feel that level of disgust at the human form. That mindset utterly baffles me, to the point where I feel unable to connect even intellectually with it.
That’s not the only interesting thing about this painting, though. The other interesting thing about this painting is that Rembrandt used his wife as the model for the woman you see here, but put his mistress’s head on her.
Dude had it goin’ on, yo!
By the way, I’m deeply enjoying your descriptions. Thank you!
By the way, I’m deeply enjoying your descriptions. Thank you!
The painting with the nude reclining is actually formulaic. There’s a lot like that, with the same basic elements. You may have known that already. That one lacks the dog, however. Manet’s Olympia was a parody of the type. Are you familiar with the story behind Olympia?
Totally. So cliche, it’s almost boring.
It makes me love Olympia more. Syphilis, political tensions, promiscuity, and non-submissive behaviour for the win.
I wasn’t when you posted but half an hour with Google later I am. Interesting stuff, thanks!
The painting with the nude reclining is actually formulaic. There’s a lot like that, with the same basic elements. You may have known that already. That one lacks the dog, however. Manet’s Olympia was a parody of the type. Are you familiar with the story behind Olympia?
Also, regarding that particularly creepy Bible story, have you ever read The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind? If not, have you at least heard of it?
I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never read it. Should I add it to my to-do list?
You should. If you ever do a class/listen to the lectures from a class on consciousness theory, it will come up. It was a major work in the subject.
The author proposes that, about six thousand years ago, humans didn’t have the same kind of consciousness that they have now. He refers to this proposed previous state of consciousness as the bicameral mind. He uses a number of works of literature from that era as evidence of limited comprehension of certain essential concepts to consciousness. Among them are certain books of the old testament.
A lot of the stuff that book has comes off as really out there. Just keep in mind while reading it that many of the things which sound really out there have since been vindicated by science.
@onyxrising Sounds like a really interesting book. And, it looks to be of a reasonable price. *score* I’m going to put that one on my “to-do” list as well.
It also proposes that the sort of obedience to authority/religious hierarchy that people had back then (and still do have) was one of those little adaptations which helped us function as a larger band. Especially the god-king. There’s a big difference between the sort of social structure you need to maintain a village of a couple hundred, and an early city of a few thousand.
Fair warning- part of what sparked his interest in the subject was his research with schizophrenic patients. He proposes that many of the symptoms of schizophrenia have to do with said proposed earlier state of consciousness.
Of relevance?
The Insanity Virus
Fascinating.
There have been a lot of diseases in recent years wherein a virus or potential viral component has been spotted. For many of them, I seem to recall a virus turning out, in the end, to be one of many things which could cause it.
You know, that could explain why schizophrenia seems to be linked to high stress periods in the victim’s life. Stress lets virii get out of control.
Also, regarding that particularly creepy Bible story, have you ever read The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind? If not, have you at least heard of it?
Totally. So cliche, it’s almost boring.
I like your descriptions better than what the real ones probably are.
As do I.
It gives me the wonderful image of Tacit sneaking into a high school AP art history class and claiming to be the substitute teacher for the day.
I like your descriptions better than what the real ones probably are.
It makes me love Olympia more. Syphilis, political tensions, promiscuity, and non-submissive behaviour for the win.
This had my roommate asking what was so funny, and me trying to explain why a description of a trip to the Hermitage was hilarious.
Only problem is that now I’m trying to figure out what that painting with the winged dude, cupid thing, blond chick and effeminate guy is of…I’m pretty sure neo-classical painting of a Greek myth, but drawing a blank beyond that.
As for disturbing Bible stories, the one that really gets me is that part where after the destruction of Sodom & Gomorrah, Lot and his daughters went to live in a cave, they wanted kids, so they got Lot really drunk and screwed him. It gets even more disturbing when you think about the fact that the daughters did not have accurate ovulation predictor tests, so they must have tried multiple times, and I’m really not sure about there being a state of inebriation where a man is drunk enough to have sex with his daughter, but not too drunk to fuck.
This is why it’s best to view the Bible as a collection of allegory, folklore, and history, to be used as a source of inspiration but not taken as being 100% literal fact.
This had my roommate asking what was so funny, and me trying to explain why a description of a trip to the Hermitage was hilarious.
Only problem is that now I’m trying to figure out what that painting with the winged dude, cupid thing, blond chick and effeminate guy is of…I’m pretty sure neo-classical painting of a Greek myth, but drawing a blank beyond that.
As for disturbing Bible stories, the one that really gets me is that part where after the destruction of Sodom & Gomorrah, Lot and his daughters went to live in a cave, they wanted kids, so they got Lot really drunk and screwed him. It gets even more disturbing when you think about the fact that the daughters did not have accurate ovulation predictor tests, so they must have tried multiple times, and I’m really not sure about there being a state of inebriation where a man is drunk enough to have sex with his daughter, but not too drunk to fuck.
This is why it’s best to view the Bible as a collection of allegory, folklore, and history, to be used as a source of inspiration but not taken as being 100% literal fact.
I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never read it. Should I add it to my to-do list?
I wasn’t when you posted but half an hour with Google later I am. Interesting stuff, thanks!
The slave being auctioned looks like she has a hangover.
That might be how she ended up on the auction block. I’m sure we’ve all had one of those weekends…
Oh now that is a thought. Makes for a hot fantasy…or a scary reality!
Heh. Isn’t it funny how the hottest fantasies tend to be correlated with the scariest realities?
The slave being auctioned looks like she has a hangover.
That might be how she ended up on the auction block. I’m sure we’ve all had one of those weekends…
Oh now that is a thought. Makes for a hot fantasy…or a scary reality!
Heh. Isn’t it funny how the hottest fantasies tend to be correlated with the scariest realities?
You should. If you ever do a class/listen to the lectures from a class on consciousness theory, it will come up. It was a major work in the subject.
The author proposes that, about six thousand years ago, humans didn’t have the same kind of consciousness that they have now. He refers to this proposed previous state of consciousness as the bicameral mind. He uses a number of works of literature from that era as evidence of limited comprehension of certain essential concepts to consciousness. Among them are certain books of the old testament.
A lot of the stuff that book has comes off as really out there. Just keep in mind while reading it that many of the things which sound really out there have since been vindicated by science.
“After being bitten and infected with the stone virus, he waits. Quietly, day after day, year after year, he waits. When the stars are right, and the hold of the virus weakens, he will drag himself free of his marble prison. Then he will shamble across the great halls of the museum at night, needing only the blood of the living to remove the curse and fuel his unholy desire for vengeance. On that day, they will pay, the ones who kept him caged here behind ropes of red velvet, a curiosity to attract the throngs of tourists. Oh, yes. They will pay. “
*love*
“After being bitten and infected with the stone virus, he waits. Quietly, day after day, year after year, he waits. When the stars are right, and the hold of the virus weakens, he will drag himself free of his marble prison. Then he will shamble across the great halls of the museum at night, needing only the blood of the living to remove the curse and fuel his unholy desire for vengeance. On that day, they will pay, the ones who kept him caged here behind ropes of red velvet, a curiosity to attract the throngs of tourists. Oh, yes. They will pay. “
*love*
@onyxrising Sounds like a really interesting book. And, it looks to be of a reasonable price. *score* I’m going to put that one on my “to-do” list as well.
<3
<3
It also proposes that the sort of obedience to authority/religious hierarchy that people had back then (and still do have) was one of those little adaptations which helped us function as a larger band. Especially the god-king. There’s a big difference between the sort of social structure you need to maintain a village of a couple hundred, and an early city of a few thousand.
Fair warning- part of what sparked his interest in the subject was his research with schizophrenic patients. He proposes that many of the symptoms of schizophrenia have to do with said proposed earlier state of consciousness.
As do I.
It gives me the wonderful image of Tacit sneaking into a high school AP art history class and claiming to be the substitute teacher for the day.
About Danae. Originally, Saskia (wealthy first wife) was indeed painted by Rembrandt. However, after her death, he changed the face to the one of his less known mistress, Geertje Dircx. Saskia’s family was deeply offended by the picture’s transformation, and by some accounts even sued him. After Rembrandt began his affair with Hendrickje Stoffels, Geertje started legal proceedings against him claiming that he broke his promises to her but lost and eventually he contributed to her incarceration. He never married any of these two mistresses because he would have lost his inheritance from Saskia. Quite a story…
As for the deranged Lithuanian, he had asked the lady on duty what was the most famous painting in the Hermitage. When he learned it was Danae, he threw acid on the painting and also slashed it twice with a knife. This is why the restoration took so long, until the reappearance of this jewel in 1997. I never heard that story before about nudity and children, which would not suit a madman that much. Are there any accounts to check?
About Danae. Originally, Saskia (wealthy first wife) was indeed painted by Rembrandt. However, after her death, he changed the face to the one of his less known mistress, Geertje Dircx. Saskia’s family was deeply offended by the picture’s transformation, and by some accounts even sued him. After Rembrandt began his affair with Hendrickje Stoffels, Geertje started legal proceedings against him claiming that he broke his promises to her but lost and eventually he contributed to her incarceration. He never married any of these two mistresses because he would have lost his inheritance from Saskia. Quite a story…
As for the deranged Lithuanian, he had asked the lady on duty what was the most famous painting in the Hermitage. When he learned it was Danae, he threw acid on the painting and also slashed it twice with a knife. This is why the restoration took so long, until the reappearance of this jewel in 1997. I never heard that story before about nudity and children, which would not suit a madman that much. Are there any accounts to check?
Of relevance?
The Insanity Virus
Fascinating.
There have been a lot of diseases in recent years wherein a virus or potential viral component has been spotted. For many of them, I seem to recall a virus turning out, in the end, to be one of many things which could cause it.
You know, that could explain why schizophrenia seems to be linked to high stress periods in the victim’s life. Stress lets virii get out of control.