The last hall of the Neva Enfilade in the Old Hermitage, the former Corner Reception Room, has retained the character of the decoration created in the 1850s to the design of Andrei Ivanovich Stakenschneider (1802–1865), St Petersburg’s foremost architect in the era of eclecticism. The marble fireplace with lapis-lazuli insets that adorns this interior was produced at the Peterhof Lapidary Works in 1852.
This hall is devoted to Mannerism, a tendency within Late Italian Renaissance art that originated in Florence. The works displayed here acquaint visitors with the figurative language of artists who, striving after creative freedom and rejecting rules that had with time turned into dogma, resorted to bold compositional approaches, sharp contrasts of colour and unexpected treatments of space.
The pioneers of the Mannerist tendency included Jacopo Pontormo (1494–1557), the painter of the Virgin and Child with St Joseph and St John the Baptist. One of the leading Mannerists of the same generation was Rosso Fiorentino (1494–1540), who produced the Virgin and the Child with Angels (or Madonna in Glory). The first wave of Florentine Mannerism also included Bachiacca (Francesco Ubertini, 1494–1557), a master miniaturist, whose Saint Lawrence here is among his few large works.
The Florentine sculptor Pietro Tacca (1577–1640) is represented by the bronze group Nessus and Deianira depicting the centaur’s attempt to abduct the wife of Heracles. Also executed in bronze is the Rape of the Sabine Women, a work by a Florentine sculptor of the mid-16th century.
