On 6 December 2024, during the Hermitage Days, the exhibition “Look into the Monsters’ Eyes… Mythical Personifications of Horror in Antiquity and Their Slayers” begins its run in the Twelve-Column Hall (Hall 244). For the first time, the subject of an exhibition is not the handsome gods and heroes of Classical legends, but the mythical creatures, monsters and beasts, that instil horror and dread, and whose appearance has found striking embodiment in art across the ages from Classical Antiquity to the Modern Era.
More than 250 exhibits acquaint visitors with the fantastic world of terrifying monsters in Classical mythology: from the serpentine Lernaean Hydra to the Gorgon with snakes instead of hair whose mere gaze would turn you to stone, from winged half-maidens, half-lionesses to the demonic Sirens who were half-bird and half-woman; from the horrific monsters born from the union of Echidna and Typhon to Hecate, the goddess of nocturnal visions and sorcery.
The Hermitage collection is drawn upon to present visitors with a gallery of depictions of those monster as living embodiments of one or other of the fears that beset the Ancient Greeks: fear of the maritime element (the sea dragon, Scylla); fear of unknown shores (Cyclopes, Sirens); fear of an unfamiliar city (the Minotaur), fear of the forest (centaurs, Pan), fear of volcanic eruptions (the Chimera), fear of alien lands (the Sphinx, centaurs), fear of swamps (the Hydra), fear of a divine prohibition (dragons), fear of the dangers of night (the Empusa, Lamias, Hecate), fear of death (Cerberus).
Their iconography is reflected in items from Classical Antiquity in the Hermitage’s collection (vases, sculptures, terracottas, carved stones, pieces of jewellery, coins), in Assyrian and Egyptian artworks (cylindrical seals, reliefs and statuettes). The exhibits include a unique 16th-century Venetian shield bearing a hydra, an outstanding example of ancient metalworking – a silver plaque with the face of the Gorgon Medusa from the Artyukhova burial mound; an extremely rare fragment of an Etruscan bronze sculpture depicting the Chimera. In an outstanding example of early red-figure painting, an Attic amphora shows Heracles shooting an arrow at the serpent Ladon that was guarding the apples of the Hesperides (previously believed to be a hydra). Also noteworthy is a Greek kylix (drinking cup for wine) decorated with a running Minotaur in a rare instance of him appearing alone, rather than in a scene of his fight with Theseus. A gold bracelet with sphinxes from the Kul-Oba burial mound is a masterpiece of ancient jewellery that was made for the wife of a Scythian ruler.
When the Greco-Roman world passed away, the images of the ancient monsters did not vanish, did not fade into oblivion, but rather became a firm part of the repertoire of European art in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Modern Era. They can be found in paintings, drawings and prints, in the form of sculptures and reliefs, on pieces of applied art (decorated tableware, majolica and Limoges enamels, cameos and intaglios, personal adornments and even embossed leather wallpaper).
The semidarkness created in the Twelve-Column Hall as a requirement for the display of the graphic works depicting mythological scenes produces an atmosphere in keeping with the spirit of the exhibition – the dreadful creatures that await us in the gloom.
An image of Greek culture amassing individual horrors within it is embodied in Leon Bakst’s 1908 painting Terror Antiquus from the collection of the State Russian Museum. The fantastic bestiary of ancient monsters is concluded – as if summing up the manifestation of horrific images from Antiquity in contemporary art – by Louise Bourgeois’s sculpture Nature Study which resembles a sphinx or gryphon without a head.
The display has been prepared by the State Hermitage’s Department of Classical Antiquity under the leadership of Anna Trofimova.