The Corsini collection paintings included Pontormo's
"Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist" (1523/25).Italian cultural life swept into St Petersburg last week in the form of an extraordinary exhibition of pictures from the family art collection of the Italian Corsini princes.
Twenty-two 15th-17th century paintings were put on the display in the Twelve-Column Hall of the Hermitage.
Pictures by Giovanni Bellini (1425-1516), Luca Giordano (1632-1705), Sandro Botticelli (1444/45-1510), Luca Signorelli (1445/50-1523), Jacopo Carucci named Pontormo and other Florentine artists were selected from the 155-strong private collection of the Corsini princes of Florence.
Princess Giorgiana Corsini, who visited St Petersburg to present the works, said of the unique collection, "My ancestors bought many of these paintings when the artists were unknowns."
That is hardly the case today.
Among the most outstanding pictures of the exhibition is Pontormo's "Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist" (1523/25).
Young Madonna, supporting a peaceful baby-Jesus, worriedly looks on small John, whose eyes reveal nervousness and suffering. The style is almost icon-like. The painting's colors are pure and clear and the plot invites religious contemplation.
One of the most thought provoking works is Francesco Rosselli's "Execution of Savonarola on Piazza Signoria" (dating from about 1500).
It depicts the burning at the stake in 1498 of the prior of the Domenican San Marco monastery prior, Girolamo Savonarola, who had been expelled from the church three years earlier and convicted of heresy. Savonarola had challenged the papacy and the Medici ruling family by appealing to people to follow eternal moral and religious values before the dictates of the rulers of the day.
He so greatly affected his audiences that Michelangelo broke off his career as a result of one of Savonarola's sermons, and Botticelli stopped painting on Savonarola's death.
Rosselli's picture shows the action at various stages: Savonarola kneeling between two other victims outside the Florence Town Hall, whose dark volume balances light colours of the Signoria square; Savonarola being led to the fire; Savonarola hung and burned.
The style, showing stages of an entire action in one painting, is typical of art of the Middle Ages. The picture is also interesting for the detail with which its portrays contemporary Florence, a concentration of pale, narrow, tightly compressed 3-5 storey houses with red roofs. Rosselli moved the large Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral and other churches and monuments into the picture to render the scene more impressive.
Though Princess Corsini says she prefers not to favor one painting over any other in the collection, she admits that Rosselli's "Execution of Savonarola on Piazza Signoria" is one of her personal favorites.
The St Petersburg exhibition of the works marks the first time such a large-scale group of pictures has left the Corsini palace in Florence.
"Sometimes we offer one or another painting to an exhibition, but in Florence," Princess Corsini said. "The pictures have never been far away, because they are very delicate. They can't travel.
"This time we have taken this big decision to send them so far away because it is the Hermitage. They will be looked after in a very special way."
She said she was very pleased with the display. "It is fantastic, it couldn't be better. I couldn't have hoped for it to be so beautiful."
In spite of their age the paintings look remarkably fresh, as if they have lately been restored.
But Princess Corsini said paintings in the Corsini collection are almost never restored. "We keep them well. We don't have many visitors, so they are better protected." In any case, she said, restoration work might destroy the pictures "passage of the time."
Only two pictures in the current exhibition (including "Muses" by Domenico Fetti) have ever been restored, despite some of them having been painted almost 600 years ago.