When the Hermitage was planning it's 250th Birthday party
Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director, asked if they could mark this
with one great loan from their sister institution The British Museum
and obviously that had to be a very big object an important one
If you want only one thing to have in the celebration it's The British Museum
If you have only one thing to be shown
a real masterpiece of all the masterpieces
it will be something from Parthenon
The loan was discussed over about two years
obviously all great works of art travel incognito for security reasons
and it arrived just a few days ago in St Pertersburg
We wanted to choose one of the Parthenon sculptures
that spoke of the great ideals not just of Ancient Athens but of the Enlightenment
and that's why we chose the river god, Ilissos
It's not just a wonderful image of an athletic young man about to rise
it's also of course reference to river Illisos just outside Ancient Athens
And you can see in the way the drapery turns into water that this is both a person and a river
And Plato tells us that along the banks of the Illisos
Socrates and Phaedrus talked about the morality of love and the value of beauty
and the good society
It's a piece of philosophy as well as a piece of sculpture
What is special about the Hermitage is that the rooms
designed by the German architect Klenze for the sculpture here
are without questions the most beautiful rooms
for showing antique sculpture anywhere in the world
We expected that there would be a lot of interest in the story
and there has been
this fits exactly into the mission of the museum
which is museum of the world for the world
so last year the museum lent some five thousand objects
to some three hundred and forty museums around the world and around the United Kingdom
The strong instinct of the trustees is to lend this fantastic collection
under the right circumstances of conservation and return
that's what we want to do
and so with an issue like the Hermitage says can we do this?
we think about it carefully and we say great let's do it
It is I think very pleasing because it will I hope remind everybody
of the importance of allowing the public of the world
to see the things that are the shared inheritance of humanity
The great works of art are like the writings of Shakespeare
they belong to everybody
and the whole world shares them
and they mean different things in different places
and the great works in The British Museum belong to everybody
and that's also one of the points of this loan
to remind everyone that the people of Russia have a right to see these objects
It's a great symbol of first relations between the two museums
second the trust which exists between the cultural institutions
and it shows that well I think all the politicians must look at us how we trust each other
how we work
how we keep these bridges, cultural bridges open
because in today's situation this normal museum exchange is becoming very important
it's such a good will
There's a fantastic gesture of friendship between museums and we do appreciate it
especially coming from Britain, especially coming from such a time