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Sber is supporting the development of the Hermitage Academy

Published 07 October 2020

In October 2020, the State Hermitage and Sber [the new brand name for Sberbank] are launching a new programme of collaboration – a project for the development of the Hermitage Academy multimedia platform that brings together all the museum’s public education resources.

At present, the site offers over 200 articles on 24 subject areas that provide a convenient format for users to acquaint themselves with the history of the museum, its buildings and collections, the art and culture of different eras and peoples, and individual genres of art.

The first phase in the partnership was the creation of a new Lectures section. In video lecture format, members of the Hermitage staff will tell about the main stages in the history of world culture and a variety of artistic phenomena.

Thanks to the support of Sber, everyone interested in art and seeking to expand their mental horizons will have greater opportunities to find out about the history of artistic culture around the globe in an interactive online format.

The second phase will be the integration of the Hermitage Academy educational platform with SberClass, a digital platform for schools providing modern tools and new formats for in-person interactions between teachers and pupils. In the learning process, users will be provided with direct access to the Hermitage Academy content.

The Lectures section will be inaugurated with a series of talks on “The Art of Ancient Greece, Rome and the South of Russia. The View from the Hermitage” devised by researchers from the Department of Classical Antiquity in conjunction with colleagues from the State Hermitage’s Sector for the Production of Electronic Publications.

Step by step, the researchers from the Department of Classical Antiquity will take viewers across the centuries from the birth of Greek civilization to the fall of Rome. The first lectures are devoted to Ancient Greek history in its Dark Ages and the Archaic Period.

Further lectures in the series are in preparation – on the art of the Hellenistic Period, of Ancient Rome and the Greek colonies in the northern Black Sea region and the south of Russia.

Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage:

“Museums and banks are traditionally considered very conservative organizations. It is noteworthy that at this moment one of the world’s most famous museums and a bank that has become an innovative ecosystem – the Hermitage and Sber – are giving people the opportunity to encounter art in such a modern, non-standard manner. The Hermitage lecture room online is a medicine for the pandemic, for fear and loneliness, one that reveals the secret spirit of the museum storerooms and the mysteries of the course of thinking of museum research.”

Tatyana Zavyalova, Senior Vice-President of the public joint-stock company Sberbank:

“Today people are actively engaged in their own personal development, and that makes access to quality content and the existence of free-of-charge tools particularly important. The Hermitage and Sber, possessing a tremendous stock of cultural knowledge on the one hand and technological resources on the other, are simply duty bound to respond to this demand and to tell people about art in a modern digital manner. Beginning with the launch of an online lecture series about the art of the Ancient World, we will be gradually developing leading-edge formats of edutainment on the basis of the Hermitage Academy – online guided tours, games, quests and other interactive content for adults and children. Together we shall seek to make the museum’s platform interesting to a broad range of users and at the same time to provide online access to one of the world’s greatest collections of art to school pupils through the integration of the content into the SberClass digital platform for schools.”

 This project is being implemented with the support of Sber