An Exhibition of a Single Painting Opens at the Hermitage: "Titian. The Last Masterpiece: Saint Sebastian"

An exhibition of a single painting, "Titian. The Last Masterpiece: Saint Sebastian", has opened at the Hermitage. The end of the canvas's three-year restoration coincides with the 450th anniversary of Titian's death.

The picture was painted in the technique of pittura a macchia, painting in patches, around 1576, in the last year of the artist's life, in a Venice gripped by plague. For the sixteenth century, an image shaped not by contour but by strokes and patches of colour was radical. Three hundred years later, this would be called a painterly manner without a rigid drawn line.

For decades the canvas lay hidden beneath darkened varnish and later overpainting, other hands' retouching laid over the artist's own layer. The Hermitage restorer Sergey Kiselyov has removed these accretions. Details have emerged from beneath the varnish that viewers had in effect never seen: the modelling of light and shade, the working of the Roman cuirass, the contrast of the setting sun with the glow of a bonfire in the background. The exhibition shows not merely a cleaned painting but the whole process of restoration, and, in essence, Titian's paint layer read anew.

The exhibition runs until 27 August in the Main Museum Complex.

Photographs by Andrey Pavlyuchenkov