Pyramidal perspective

The exhibition “Egyptomania. To the 200th anniversary of the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs by Jean-Francois Champollion. It exhibits more than 700 monuments of the Egyptian style in sculpture, painting, furniture, costumes, stone-cutting and jewelry art. Items from the Hermitage collection are presented together with exhibits from the collections of 16 museums and libraries. Kira Dolinina believes that the topic of one of the most contagious cultural diseases of old Europe can be extremely relevant – depending on how you look and what to see.

The exhibition on Egyptomania is an unconditional trump card for the Hermitage, which has been excluded from its permanent international inter-museum process. In principle, the St. Petersburg museum is large and powerful enough to compose exhibitions on almost all historical and artistic topical topics, but it is the East that is the creme de la creme of both the collection itself and the science that lives behind the closed doors of the museum’s scientific departments. The fact is that historically the Hermitage’s Oriental Department (both Imperial and State) is very strong precisely from a scientific point of view, many of its employees were world-class scientists, and for several generations the director of the museum has been almost exclusively orientalists or archaeologists of the Middle East. The same applies to the place of Oriental studies in the Soviet humanities as a whole – it is so difficult to master a specialty that you really need to really, really want it. Despite the fact that before the East Faculty, applicants had to pass through a fine sieve of party selection – without this, they were not allowed to take exams.

At the same time, the Hermitage’s own Egypt is not at all as impressive as that of the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the British Museum. Catherine II suffered from Egyptomania, but preferred to build a pyramid in her Tsarskoye Selo. Alexander I did not go to Egypt for Napoleon, who decently robbed the magical land, contenting himself with the “Egyptian service” donated by the Corsican based on the drawings of the “author” of the Louvre, Dominique Vivant-Denon. Nicholas I respected Egypt and did not spare the money to purchase, for example, two huge sphinxes from the sanctuary of Pharaoh Amenhotep III. Sphinxes, of course, are street art, and mummies, sarcophagi, ceramics, papyri and much more, primarily brought by Russian travelers of the 19th century, gradually settled in the museum itself.

However, the exhibition itself in no way repeats the Egyptian section of the Hermitage. It is not so much about Egyptian art, but about how Egyptian art influenced the art of Europe. From ancient curtsies towards the eastern neighbor to the explosion of Egyptomania in the era of romanticism, when things brought by Napoleon began to dictate fashion in all types of art, including literary and operatic subjects. From the Egyptian motifs of “fireplaces and all other parts of houses” by Piranesi (1769) to Egyptian motifs in the architecture of St. Petersburg of various times.

The name of the exhibition clearly distinguishes the second hero after Egyptomania: Jean-Francois Champollion (1790–1832), a scientist who fell ill with Egypt as a child, was awarded the title of professor at the University of Grenoble at the age of 20 and deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics at the age of 31. Like many other scientists of his time, Champollion worked with copies of the Rosetta Stone, found by the French, but beaten off by the British, who took the stone to London. The uniqueness of the find is that it preserved a text of identical content, fixed in three ways – in ancient Greek, “standard” Egyptian hieroglyphs-pictures and Egyptian demotic writing, which is a cursive script of the late Egyptian era. The comparison and superimposition of texts has given linguists the hope of deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. But things did not really move until the moment when Champollion saw several names in the inscription on the stone, which allowed him to conclude that the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing is phonetic, and, therefore, it is necessary to read it, collecting possible sounds and syllables.

Champollion’s discovery is one of those discoveries that children are told about, once and for all infecting them with scientific excitement. The name of Champollion in the title is an underline of the scientific intentions of the museum. This is understandable – after the belligerent interview of the director of the Hermitage in June 2022, it seems that only high science can overcome the self-built iron curtain around the museum. Egyptology is a good start for this process. Here is just a painfully outdated version of it here – when the entire Western world is engaged in the purification of colonial optics, the Hermitage does not say a word about it. In the end, and 200 years ago, Egyptomania was the flesh of the flesh of imperial thinking.