An exhibition opened at the Winter Palace
"Antique Myth in the Work of Bertel Thorvaldsen. Drawings and sculpture from the collections of the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen and the Hermitage"the exhibition was organized by the State Hermitage Museum and the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen.
The exhibition commemorates the 250th anniversary of the birth of the outstanding Danish sculptor, one of the leading masters of the neoclassical era. Bertel Thorvaldsen's artistic legacy, both sculptural and graphic, includes a large number of works influenced by antique mythology. Among them is the marble statue of "Ganymede" at the exhibition, a beautiful young wine-cherryman on Mount Olympus, whose story is repeatedly found in ancient literature, particularly in Ovid's Metamorphoses.
According to Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage Museum: "The drawings of the remarkable sculptor-Classicist, the pride of Denmark, Bertel Thorvaldsen, have given us an occasion to show them intelligently in dialogue with his own beautiful reliefs and to recall this great 'Hermitage' sculptor looking at us from the ceiling of Jupiter Hall and gracefully opposing his chief rival, Antonio Canova, in the Gallery of the History of Ancient Painting of the New Hermitage. For the Hermitage, the image of artistic communication with Denmark is, of course, inextricably linked to the memory of our esteemed Empress Maria Fedorovna, Danish Princess Dagmar, whose ashes have recently made the return journey to St. Petersburg to be reinterred in the Peter and Paul Cathedral. Thorvaldsen is also at home here.
Prepared on the materials of the official site of the museum
State Hermitage Museum.