Walking through the halls with medieval collection of a museum or entering a Gothic cathedral with lots of statues, stained-glass windows, altar images and frescoes, the modern viewer often gets confused. This is so not only because he does not know Biblical stories or does not remember by heart all the Hebrew prophets or Christian saints. Often the misunderstanding lays in how an image is designed and how to read it.

Where is the beginning and the end of a story? Why some figures are depicted several times on the same image? What their poses and gestures mean? Why certain objects are painted in unnatural colors, and people are in size of a church or castle’s tower? Besides, museum exhibits were not created as museum exhibits.

Every item, that nowadays has an inventory number and is inscribed in the genealogy of visual forms, served a specific – practical of symbolical – function. Without knowing why they were carved of stone, cast of metal or painted, how and by whom they were ones used, we will not be able to understand how to look at them today. In this course of seven lectures medievalist Mikhail Maizuls searches answers to these questions on the example of medieval sculptures and altar panels from the collection of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.

A new course of the Virtual Academy is prepared by the leading Russian specialists in new media and technologies. It is focused on video art, cinema, computer and interactive art, video and digital performance, artificial intelligence, net art, crypto art and an emerging phenomenon of NFT (Non-Fungible Token – a type of digital assets/certificates used to sell digital goods, artworks included). The course gives a revised approach to presenting its content: instead of a lecturer, we have a guide who leads viewers through the flux of visual imagery; and instead of simple illustrations, we have a dynamic collage of image and sound.

The page is avaliable only in Russian.

We apologize for any inconvenience!

The page is avaliable only in Russian.

We apologize for any inconvenience!

The page is avaliable only in Russian.

We apologize for any inconvenience!

The page is avaliable only in Russian.

We apologize for any inconvenience!

The page is avaliable only in Russian.

We apologize for any inconvenience!

Направление Пушкинский.Ю объединяет все программы, которые в Пушкинском музее адресованы молодежи. Это лекции, семинары, творческие проекты, молодежная конференция, исследовательская лаборатория и просто место, где можно найти собеседников и единомышленников.