Sandro Botticelli

His work is thought to represent the linear grace of Early Renaissance painting.

Botticheli – St Dominic and St Jerome. Both paintings are from the later period of the artist’s life.

Private life

Botticelli never wed, and expressed a strong aversion (отвращение) to the idea of marriage, a prospect he claimed gave him nightmares. But he wasn`t a monk either.

Pietro Perugino

The teacher of Raphael.

St Sebastian Between 1493 and 1494

Sebastian was a Roman soldier who served in the private guard of the Emperor Diocletian. For his faith in the teachings of Christ the Emperor condemned him to death and he was taken out, tied to a column and shot at with arrows. Italian masters often depicted the semi-naked Sebastian in full-length, his body pierced by arrows, drawn not by the scene of execution but by the opportunity to show the beauty of the naked body.

Perugino, however, shows Sebastian only half-length, revealing his perfect command of light-and-shade modeling. Sebastian's marvellous face does not express suffering but in his gaze raised to the heavens there is only thoughtful prayer. Dramatism was alien to the work of Perugino, the leading Umbrian artist of the late 15th century. On the arrow which projects from the saint's neck the artist painted his name in gold letters.

Lorenzo Costa Portrait of a lady

It was during the Renaissance period that portraiture became an independent and highly popular genre, largely thanks to the rich opportunities it provided to express Renaissance conceptions of the supreme value of man. The simple composition of this portrait is typical for the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Its dark background and restrained colouring, the somewhat flat rendering of the torso and shoulders, all force the viewer to concentrate on the sitter's face.

The Leonardo Room

This fine room, housing two masterpieces by Leonardo da Vinci, The Madonna with a Flower (The Benois Madonna) and The Madonna and Child (The Litta Madonna), was designed by Andrei Stackenschneider in 1858. This is one of the suite of Reserve Rooms (guest rooms) of the Large Hermitage. The room's decoration is based on a combination of the light-coloured walls with porphyry and jasper columns, lapis lazuli inlays in marble mantelpieces, and rich gilt. Worthy of note is the decoration of the doors in the Boulle technique (inlay with tortoise-shell and copper). Panels in the upper part of the walls are painted by the 17th-century Italian artist Padovanino (Alessandro Varotari); several additional pictorial panels were produced in the 1850s. The six oval medallions over the doors show portraits of field marshals

Giovanni della Robbia The Nativity

Maiolica.

The della Robbia family gained widespread fame for its majolica works in Renaissance Italy. (Majolica is a soft earthenware ceramic)Giovanni, a representative of the third generation of this family of Florentine sculptors, here took as his prototype a composition by Antonio Rossellino. Varies shades of glaze covering the relief create a rich colour scheme and reinforce the joyfulness of the scene.