On 2 December 2020, the exhibition “Two Palmyras. Architecture”, devoted to the mutual links between Palmyra and Saint Petersburg – the Northern Palmyra, opened in the General Staff building.
Participating in the opening ceremony, which took place in online format, were Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, Natalia Solovyeva, Deputy Director of the Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Maxim Atayants, a Russian architect and artist, lecturer on the history of architecture and architectural design; Sergei Androsov, head of the Hermitage’s Department of Western European Fine Art; and Sergei Orekhov, researcher in the Department of Western European Fine Art and curator of the exhibition.
“The opening of the exhibitions is part of the Day of Palmyra in the Hermitage that we are holding together with the Institute for the History of Material Culture, UNESCO and Maxim Atayants’s studio. Altogether there is a round table discussion, a plenary session with our recommendations for the revival of Palmyra the heritage site and Palmyra-Tadmor as a town, and the opening of three exhibitions,” Mikhail Piotrovsky said. “During the pandemic we have started to produce some very clever exhibitions. They require effort, but in return those efforts bring great joy. Our colleagues have gathered together and juxtaposed for comparison engravings from the time when Carlo Rossi built the General Staff and books from the time when Catherine II was being compared to Zenobia, the Queen of Palmyra, which is where ‘Northern Palmyra’ came from. You will see in effect some scholarly discoveries – comparisons of the way that Rossi, looking at Palmyra, constructed our General Staff building. With a very high degree of probability, his brilliant treatment of the arch that introduces the street into the city was connected with impressions of Palmyra. The engravings run smoothly over into the drawings, and that too is a distinctive feature of the exhibition. Drawings by an artist who has been to Palmyra several times, even after the destruction.”
“In human history, during wars and conflicts,” Maxim Atayants said, “architectural monuments get treated in the same way as people: they are taken prisoner, tortured and attempts are made to deprive them of their lives. Each time you see that sort of thing you are gripped by some kind of impotence that is compensated by a desire to do something about it. That very strong feeling, which arose simultaneously in several people five years ago, has developed into what we see today.”
The more than 60 items in the exhibition – drawings, technical plans, engravings, books, photographs and a model – not only bring out the similarity of architectural approaches between the “two Palmyras”, but also clearly demonstrate the continuous nature of the study and the reflection on the legacy of Palmyra by scholars and architects over the course of centuries, and also the value of these figurative sources for the reconstruction of individual edifices and the complex as a whole.
Palmyra (Tadmor in Arabic, “the city of palms”) was one of the richest cities of the East in late Antiquity. Destroyed by Emperor Aurelian in the 3rd century AD, it was rediscovered by Europeans in the late 17th century and up until the invention of photography was known only from the drawings and prints that feature in the exhibition. Those include the first engraved panoramic views of the ancient city from the turn of the 18th century, the first illustrated description of Palmyra, published by James Dawkins and Robert Wood in 1753, and also the 1799 publication by the French architect Louis-Francois Cassas that sought to surpass it. These images revealed the appearance of Palmyra to the European public, shaped a conception of it as a beautiful city filled with majestic works of Classical architecture, a hard-to-reach splinter of European civilization lost amid the wilderness. It was that image which became key to the comparison between the Palmyra of the desert and Saint Petersburg – the Palmyra of the North.
Drawings showing Palace Square at the turn of the 19th century remind visitors of the urban planning challenge that was handed to Carlo Rossi, while his technical drawings for the arch of the General Staff reveal the stages in a creative search and also the role that the architecture of Palmyra played in it.
The exhibition also includes photographs of Palmyra from the 1870s and ’80s, when the place became more accessible to travellers and scholars from Europe. It was like this that Palmyra appeared to Prince Semion Abamelek-Lazarev, an amateur archaeologist and author of the first Russian-language study on the ancient city, thanks to whom the Palmyrene Customs Tariff, an outstanding monument of writing and history, came into the Hermitage.
Present-day views of Palmyra are represented in the exhibition by drawings made by our contemporary, the architect and artist Maxim Atayants. The technique in which they were executed harks back to the sketches made by the 18th-century draughtsmen who introduced Europe to the appearance of Palmyra, Baalbek, Paestum and other ancient cities. The degree of detailing and the laborious nature of the creation of these works is reminiscent of the finest examples of the engraved veduta genre from that same period – works by Antonio Canaletto and Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Maxim Atayants made his drawings on the spot in 2005 and 2019, that is to say, before and after the destruction of Palmyra’s edifices as a result of the conflicts in Syria.
The exhibition “Two Palmyras. Architecture” is included in the route for visitors to the General Staff building.
