The "Young Woman with the Plumed Hat", who bares her shoulder and looks into the viewer's eyes, has been under siege for days.
There is a constant crowd of people around the Titian painting, which has been on view in the exhibition “Titian and the Image of Woman in Sixteenth Century Venice” at the Palazzo Reale in Milan since February 23.
Many, many visitors hold up their cell phones to take pictures.
At the beginning of the week it was said that the loan from the Hermitage would have to leave the show early and return to Saint Petersburg.
Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of the Russian State Art Museum, had asked for nothing else at the behest of the Russian Ministry of Culture.
When this became known, the number of visitors to the Palazzo Reale immediately increased.
Karen Krueger
Editor in the Feuilleton.
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Everyone has wanted to see the painting, which is at the heart of the latest episode in the Russo-Italian cultural turmoil that began with Putin's attack on Ukraine, led to the sacking of conductor Valery Gergiev at La Scala and the near cancellation of a Tolstoy seminar at La Scala Milan University Bocconi.
In the semi-darkness of the exhibition, however, the painting also seemed to become a vanishing point for the pain, grief and helplessness that many people have felt since the attack on Ukraine - the gestures of emotion that could be observed there could not be otherwise interpret.
The visitors not only photographed a masterpiece by Titian, but – as the Italian press called the picture – they also photographed a “hostage in the cold war of culture”,
Returning to Cold War rhetoric
The unexpected turn of events came on Tuesday and showed how deliberately Putin uses culture as an instrument of power politics and how reflexively the West reacts to it.
Director Piotrovsky, or rather: the Russian Ministry of Culture, to which the Petersburg museum is subordinate, has changed his mind: "On the basis of negotiations between the institutions," the "Young Woman with a Plumed Hat" and another loan can still be "several weeks" in the stay in the Palazzo Reale.
Reclaims from the Galleria d'Italia in Milan, which was supposed to return 23 items on loan from its current exhibition "Grand Tour", and from the Alda Fendi Foundation in Rome, where Pablo Picasso's "Young Woman" is currently on display, have also been suspended.
Many European museums, which are also expecting returns from Russia, must have listened carefully
when the manager of the Italian branch of the Hermitage read Piotrovsky's statement.
One very much regrets, it says, that cultural relations between Russia and Italy have "plung into such darkness".
The only way out is to preserve "the atmosphere of good will and benevolence".
“We keep repeating that the bridges of culture are the last to be blown up.
Now is the time to protect them, and we will try to show how that can be done.” Museums must not become “an instrument of political struggle” and a “return to Cold War rhetoric” must be prevented.
that cultural relations between Russia and Italy had "fallen into such obscurity".
The only way out is to preserve "the atmosphere of good will and benevolence".
“We keep repeating that the bridges of culture are the last to be blown up.
Now is the time to protect them, and we will try to show how that can be done.” Museums must not become “an instrument of political struggle” and a “return to Cold War rhetoric” must be prevented.
that cultural relations between Russia and Italy had "fallen into such obscurity".
The only way out is to preserve "the atmosphere of good will and benevolence".
“We keep repeating that the bridges of culture are the last to be blown up.
Now is the time to protect them, and we will try to show how that can be done.” Museums must not become “an instrument of political struggle” and a “return to Cold War rhetoric” must be prevented.