Renaissance arsenal – Newspaper Kommersant No. 17 (7462) dated 01/31/2023

In the Nizhny Novgorod Arsenal, the Volga-Vyatka branch of the Pushkin Museum, the exhibition “Named Vasari. Renaissance. The Art of the Renaissance and Its Followers of Different Times” – painting, graphics, sculpture, arts and crafts from the storerooms of the Pushkin Museum, next to the works of contemporary Russian artists. The spirit of the era that endowed the world with humanism and faith in man, tried to imbue Igor Grebelnikov.

This is the second part of a cycle dedicated to the three milestones of European art, as Giorgio Vasari called them in his monumental work – “Lives of the most famous painters, sculptors and architects”: last year they showed “Gothic”, at the end of this they will open “Mannerism”. “Biographies” is also a monument to the Renaissance and the Renaissance: Vasari knew many of the heroes, from these books, illustrated by him, first published in 1550, the history of art as a discipline began. At the current exhibition, you can look into the open volumes of the more complete second edition of 1568.

The curators of the exposition follow the recipe they tested at the “Gothic”: in an extensive selection of works by Renaissance authors from the collection of the Pushkin Museum, works of contemporary Russian artists are interspersed. And surprisingly, the Renaissance, with such a neighborhood, turns out to be close, clear, responsive – perhaps even the same as for the first readers of Vasari. It is not without reason that you feel that you are seeing things from the Pushkin Museum for the first time – the way it is: according to curator Daria Kolpashnikova (her co-author Ekaterina Kochetkova), the exhibition wanted to surprise, so there are no works from the permanent exhibition of the Pushkin Museum – only from the storerooms.

Having crossed the threshold of the exposition, you find yourself in a motley company – among portraits. Attributed and unknown characters, written by the masters of the Netherlands and Italy, imprinted on graphic sheets and cast in medals – all as one are filled with dignity. “Portrait of a man in a red beret with a book” (1480–1490) by Antonello de Saliba is the very embodiment of the Renaissance virtues, the so-called universal man – educated, active, open to the world and at the same time unflappable. The painters of that era, who for the first time looked intently at specific people, learned to convey the nuances of characters, and the portrait genre owes its development, which has not changed much since then at its best. The proof is the photograph hanging right there of Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, who reincarnated as Faust for his project “The Life of the Remarkable Monroes” (1995).

The portraits are interspersed with empty antique frames, adding an element of unease. It intensifies if you look back, since the entrance wall is mirrored, it reflects the exposition, clearly illustrating the principle of linear perspective, the main discovery of Renaissance painting. And as you move forward, you begin to feel the unevenness of the plywood floor – it is slightly tilted, you slowly go up.

The design of the exhibition was carried out by the artist Alexander Brodsky, a master of immersing viewers of his installations and architectural objects in special states. The same is true here: the walls and floor of the exposition are lined with light-colored plywood, which separated the audience and exhibits from the brutal arsenal brickwork. The tilted floor can make it seem like you’re off balance a little – not Stendhal’s syndrome – but it’s definitely a change in perception, even if we’re far from Florence.

Sections of the exhibition – “Image and Hero”, “Faith and Piety”, “Antiquity and Classical Tradition”, “Nature and Space”, “Science and Cognition” – intelligibly reveal the essence of the Renaissance changes in art and life – changes for the better, for creation world in which the main value will be a person. Today, when we are experiencing a terrible shortage of humanism, it is tempting to be imbued with ideals, but perhaps not so easy. Where appropriate in the midst of this world of good-looking humanists, graceful Madonnas, angels and saints, as well as landscapes in which God’s grace seems to be spilled, are the works of contemporary artists who comprehend similar topics.

At the end of the first hall, as if from its “top”, we survey a kind of ancient ruin – a large painting by Valery Koshlyakov “The She-Wolf in the Museum” (1997), painted in his signature sweeping manner with streaks of paint. The Capitoline she-wolf was sketched in the Pushkin Museum, but the artist placed her against the backdrop of the fantasy buildings of the Eternal City, as if she had been returned to Ancient Rome.

There, in Rome, but already modern, the next hall leads, at the end of which there is a video of Alexandra Mitlyanskaya “Towards Borromini”. The artist filmed tourists looking into the courtyard of a Roman palazzo to see one of the most luxurious churches of the 17th century – Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza. We do not see the church itself – only changing tourists, in groups or individually looking at the architectural masterpiece: the artist catches the moment of their fading before the unconditional beauty, familiar to everyone.

In the section devoted to the image of nature, the viewer finds himself almost close to the paintings and graphics – the mezzanine is so narrow, on which some of the exhibits are hung. And this is also a completely new experience when, willy-nilly, you plunge into the details of old graphics or “fall through” into the landscape, feeling yourself inside a painting by Olga Tobreluts or Evgenia Buravleva.

And the exhibition ends with a collection of architectural graphics by architect Maxim Atayants: old sheets with images of Roman sights, both ancient and Renaissance, side by side with sketches of the same places made by the collector himself. The artist here is like a sensitive museum curator who monitors the safety of the exhibits.

It is easy to get sick with the Renaissance, but it can also be healed – at least from pessimism, because it was the most optimistic and self-confident era of European art. It was – and is: the current exhibition in the Nizhny Novgorod Arsenal gives quite a healing effect.