World culture: Sculpture of Southeast Asia of the VII-XX centuries from the collection of the Hermitage is presented at the exhibition in Saint-Petersburg

12 February 2016
Source: The State Hermitage Museum

On February 12, 2016 in the Manege Small Hermitage Exhibition ""The sacred gift to the God…". Sculpture of Southeast Asia of the VII-XX centuries from the collection of the Hermitage", which presents more than 200 exhibits, telling about the history of culture and art of the vast region - Southeast Asia.

This vast territory includes the mainland (modern Indochinese Peninsula) and island (mainly Malay Archipelago) parts. Now here is the eleven states, sculpture of five of them - in Thailand, Burma, Laos, Vietnam and Indonesia - is represented in the Hermitage. This collection consists of more than three hundred and fifty sites.

The first items from South-East Asia (among which there were no sculptures) were in the Hermitage in 1891 - these were gifts to the King of Siam Rama V of Chulalongkorn Tsarevich Nicholas Alexandrovich, the future Emperor Nicholas II of, swipe it when visiting Siam (Thailand) during a trip to East. The basis of the Hermitage collection of sculptures of the region is a collection of Siamese (Thai) Buddhist sculpture owned by Georgy Antonovich Plansonu, a prominent diplomat of the early XX century, General and Extraordinary Envoy Russia in Siam in 1910-1916. Transferred to the Hermitage in 1931 from the Ethnographic Department of the State Russian Museum, it includes more than 200 monuments of Thai sculpture of the XV - the end of the XIX century, as well as several Burmese and Lao images. After the Second World War, in 1945-1946, it was transferred to the Hermitage several dozen monuments sculpture of Southeast Asia from the Museum of Ethnology (Museum für Völkerkunde) in Berlin. In the 1969-1970 the Hermitage received about 400 works of art in Indonesia, including dozens of sculptures made of stone and terracotta. In addition, there were individual receipts from customs, as well as through the acquisition of Expert-procurement Commission of the museum.