Opening of the exhibition “After Raphael. 1520–2020”

The exhibition was opened by Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage: “Dear friends, we are closing this year with two exhibitions devoted to Raphael: a small photographic one will open in 10 days’ time, while this main one is called “Raphael’s Line”. In English it is entitled very precisely “After Raphael”. The exhibition is large, attractive and very much in the spirit of the Hermitage, belonging to the category of “clever” exhibitions that call on people to reflect at all different levels. That is why the exhibition has been preceded by online talks from the curators about what this display is intended to say. All our exhibitions always speak about the Hermitage, and this exhibition also speaks about the Hermitage as a universal museum that can take and arrange things in a certain order and tell a story that has not been told before. This is an exhibition with a large number of Hermitage items and also with a fairly large number of items that were once in the Hermitage and went off to other museums in Russia. The exhibition is constructed around dialogues between different artists who responded to Raphael’s aesthetic ideas, and as a dialogue between the two curators. The exhibition is dynamic, mobile: restoration work is still being done on the frescoes presented here. That has been paused for the moment, but afterwards they will go back to the laboratory. We do not usually do things like that either. The main painting from abroad should also be here – La Belle Jardinière from the Louvre. Since the Louvre has only just reopened due to the coronavirus, it will arrive later. When it does come, though, the whole story will be built around it. To use modern terms, this exhibition is about Raphael’s DNA, about the Raphael virus, the Raphael cult – call it what you like. I hope that the exhibition will be seen by those who manage to visit the Hermitage before the New Year. After that there will be a 10-day break and at that time the display will be changed slightly.”

Raphael is the most influential artist of the Modern Era. Over the course of five centuries, exponents of Mannerism and Academicism, Caravaggisti and masters of the Baroque, Romantics and Modernists have invariably compared their own work with Raphael’s legacy. The choice for the central metaphor of the exhibition fell upon the line – the embodiment of interconnection, tradition, dialogue. This line joins together the works of Raphael, Giulio Romano, Parmigianino, Poussin, Rubens, Mengs, Ivanov, Venetsianov, Ingres, Corot and Picasso – and on, right up to artists of our own day. The exhibition belongs to the “exhibition-dialogue” genre – works by artists from five centuries are examined in comparison with Raphael’s art. A thoughtful analysis of this dialogue is capable of shedding light on many things, both in the oeuvre of the master himself and in the evolution of the whole of art in the Modern Era and beyond.

The large-scale display includes more than 300 exhibits – paintings, graphic art, sculpture and applied art from the Hermitage’s own stocks and twelve other collections in Russia and Western Europe. They include both famous masterpieces and previously unknown works. Dozens of paintings and pieces of graphic art are leaving the museum’s storerooms and being presented to the public for the first time, while a whole number of the exhibits are going on show after painstaking restoration in the Hermitage’s workshops.

The main premiere of the exhibition is eight monumental frescoes by the school of Raphael from the Hermitage collection that are being presented to the public for the first time in the process of restoration. The frescoes adorned the loggia of the Villa Stati-Mattei on the Palatine Hill in Rome and were created by artists from Raphael’s studio soon after the master’s death in 1520 under the guidance of his favourite pupil and heir, Giulio Romano. They are based on compositions that Raphael produced four years earlier. On display in the exhibition alongside the frescoes are preparatory drawings and fragments of cartoons for them from the collections of the British Museum and the Albertina – the artistic backstage of the school of Raphael.

Since 2015, the Department for Scientific and Technical Examination and the Laboratory for the Scientific Restoration of Monumental Paintings have been engaged in the study and restoration of the Villa Stati-Mattei frescoes. The original work is being freed from dense coverings of later overpainting, which requires a lot of time. The first intermediary results are being presented at the exhibition. For the first time in the museum’s history, people are being given the opportunity to see the process of the rebirth of an artwork taking place before their eyes. Some of the frescoes have still not undergone restoration, others are in the process of being uncovered, while work on a third group is practically complete. Displayed together, they provide a demonstration of all the main stages in the difficult task of revealing the authentic paintwork by the school of Raphael.

The exhibition “After Raphael. 1520–2020” forms part of Fixed Route No 2 around the Main Museum Complex. The exhibition can also be visited with separate tickets: the morning time slot begins at 10.00 am daily (except Monday); the evening slot is at 6.00 pm on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays and at 7.00 pm on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. The duration of the visit is one hour, and the cost of each ticket is 300 roubles.

The exhibition curators are Zoya Vladimirovna Kuptsova and Vasily Mikhailovich Uspensky, researchers in the State Hermitage’s Department of Western European Fine Art.

An educational publication Liniia Rafaelia. 1520–2020 (ArtVolkhonka publishing house, Moscow) has been prepared based on the material of the exhibition with a text by Vasily Uspensky.

This exhibition has been organized by the State Hermitage with the participation of the British Museum, Albertina, National Gallery in London, State Russian Museum, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Art, Tretyakov Gallery, Tsarskoye Selo State Museum Preserve, Nizhny Tagil Museum of Fine Arts, Icon Collection supported by the Saint Andrew the First-Called Foundation and private collectors.

More about the exhibition

You can view the opening ceremony and an online tour of the display here: