The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow Picture Gallery [antikvár]

On 11 November 1924 a new very important department was opened at the Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow-the Picture Gallery. The Museum, which formerly had only a collection of casts, Egyptian antiquities and numismatic items, was enlarged by works of Italian mastersof the 13th-17th centuries and paintings of the French School of the 17th-19th centuries; the section of Italian paintingof the 18th and 19th century and of Spanish and Flemish art of the 17th century were added to the Gallery later. Such an important collection was förmed after the works of Western European art kept in the former Rumiantsev Museum and in Sergei Tretyakov's collection, pieces of art from the priváté collections of the Yusupovs, the Shuvalovs, Brocard. Dmitry Shchukin, and others, nationalized after the October Revolution, were handed over to the Museum during 1924 -25. However, the works given by the Leningrád Hermitage were of the greatest importance in the formation of the Moscow collection. Later the Museum added new pictures to its collection by acquisitions and -exchanges with other museums. In 1948, the Picture Gallery, which until then ended its exposition with the section of art of the mid-19th century, was enriched by a part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Western Art (förmed mainly by the famous Shchukin and Morozov collections). From time to time the Museum received donations from foreign painters, such as Matisse, Guttuso, Kent, Rivera, from Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, from friends and admirers of the Museum in Soviet Union and abroad, and from priváté collectors, too. At present the Picture Gallery of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts is one of the greatest collections of foreign art in the Soviet Union and many of its sections have a world importance. The works of art which open the exposition, such as the Fayum portraits, illuminated manuscripts, the textiles from Coptic Egypt, are a kind of prologue to the history of European painting. The funeral portraits, found near the Fayum oasis, are influenced by the interaction of two cultures: the ancient Egyptian and the antique Greek and Román cultures; here the features of the funeral mask are combined with the extreme portrait resemblance and the awakening interest in the psychological characteristic of the model. One feels the prevalence of the spiritual principle especially in the portraits of the 3rd century AD. During the transitional period from Antiquity to theMiddle Ages Egypt was a part of the Eastern Román Empire and its artistic culture took an active part in the formation of Byzantine art. Christianity, which was expanding at that time and was the official religion of Romé at the end of its empire, beginning from the 5th century became the main religion in Egypt. Egyptian christians were called Copts. Coptic art, which imbibed various traditions, such as Egyptian, Hellenistic, Orientál traditions, went through several stages of development. The early period, of the 3rd and 4th centuries, represented at the exposition mainly by the famous Coptic textiles, is penetrated with the Iively breath of Hellenistic art. Later, conventional and ornamental features, typical in the Middle Ages, were intensified, Greek and Román