The State Russian Museum: Guide

📓 "You have entered the rooms of the Russian Museum Outside, beyond the walls of the palace, there has remained the noisy city. In the palace you find yourselves in the realm of calm and silence - a calm of museum suites, a silence of paintings, sculptures and drawings. But are they really silent?
The museum can be compared to a giant theatre and its rooms to the stage where a grand performance is under way. Like a usual performance this pageant of art is built up of numerous mise-en-scenes - only here they are arrested for ever (or probably for a moment?) in thousands of pictures, statues and engravings.
Look at them closely-and you will discern the well-known theatrical genres: tragedy, drama, comedy and pastoral. And literary forms can be identified quite easily too: novels, stories, novellas, poems and sonnets.
Listen to them attentively - and yen will make another rewarding discovery: artists and their characters address to you from the depth of time speaking the language of the visual arts.
The plasticity of gestures and poses of the people depicted, the harmony or dissonance of lines, volumes, colours and structures of simple or complex patterns and ornaments - all these and many other nuances form together what is called the style in art.
Every age has a distinctive style of its own, its favourite motifs, melodies, tunes and rhythms, its special sense of space and time. Learning to recognize and differentiate them you open in yourselves an access to the spiritual riches accumulated by our predecessors.
It is this opportunity to overcome the invisible wall of time, to make a pilgrimage to the past, to sense one's personal relation to history that attracts people to the museum. And so as to prevent you from getting lost on this exciting tour, we have tried to supply it with required landmarks and guidelines. As a result we offer you this art book - a guide to the Russian Museum".

Владимир Гусев