When the Hermitage was planning it's 250th
Birthday party
Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director, asked if they could mark this
with one great loan from their sister institution
The British Museum
and obviously that had to be a very big object
an important one
If you want only one thing to have in the
celebration it's The British Museum
If you have only one thing to be shown
a real masterpiece of all the masterpieces
it will be something from Parthenon
The loan was discussed over about two years
obviously all great works of art travel incognito
for security reasons
and it arrived just a few days ago in St Pertersburg
We wanted to choose one of the Parthenon sculptures
that spoke of the great ideals not just of
Ancient Athens but of the Enlightenment
and that's why we chose the river god, Ilissos
It's not just a wonderful image of an athletic
young man about to rise
it's also of course reference to river Illisos
just outside Ancient Athens
And you can see in the way the drapery turns
into water that this is both a person and a river
And Plato tells us that along the banks of
the Illisos
Socrates and Phaedrus talked about the morality
of love and the value of beauty
and the good society
It's a piece of philosophy as well as a piece
of sculpture
What is special about the Hermitage is that
the rooms
designed by the German architect Klenze for
the sculpture here
are without questions the most beautiful rooms
for showing antique sculpture anywhere in
the world
We expected that there would be a lot of interest
in the story
and there has been
this fits exactly into the mission of the
museum
which is museum of the world for the world
so last year the museum lent some five thousand
objects
to some three hundred and forty museums around
the world and around the United Kingdom
The strong instinct of the trustees is to
lend this fantastic collection
under the right circumstances of conservation
and return
that's what we want to do
and so with an issue like the Hermitage says
can we do this?
we think about it carefully and we say great
let's do it
It is I think very pleasing because it will
I hope remind everybody
of the importance of allowing the public of
the world
to see the things that are the shared inheritance
of humanity
The great works of art are like the writings
of Shakespeare
they belong to everybody
and the whole world shares them
and they mean different things in different
places
and the great works in The British Museum
belong to everybody
and that's also one of the points of this
loan
to remind everyone that the people of Russia
have a right to see these objects
It's a great symbol of first relations between
the two museums
second the trust which exists between the
cultural institutions
and it shows that well I think all the politicians
must look at us how we trust each other
how we work
how we keep these bridges, cultural bridges
open
because in today's situation this normal museum
exchange is becoming very important
it's such a good will
There's a fantastic gesture of friendship
between museums and we do appreciate it
especially coming from Britain, especially
coming from such a time
