State Hermitage Museum
The State Hermitage Museum
Location: Palace Square, 2
Distance from the hotel: 0,9 km / 0.6 miles
One of the greatest art museums of the world with the collection numbering over 3 million items, the State Hermitage occupies 5 magnificent buildings (the Winter Palace, the Small Hermitage, the Old Hermitage, the New Hermitage and the Hermitage Theatre) created by celebrated architects of the 18th to 19th century.
The oldest and the most famous building of the overall Museum ensemble is the Winter Palace – the former residence of Russian Emperors designed by Bartolomeo Rastrelli and constructed between 1754 and 1762. Containing 1057 rooms, 117 staircases, 1786 doors and 1945 windows, the Winter Palace fully reveals all the characteristic featuring Russian Baroque style - the Palace startles with grandeur scale, majestic gala forms, variety of ornamentation, irrepressible strive for brilliancy, luxury and buoyancy on the one hand and integrity and proportionality of the parts on the other. In 1764-1777 next to the main Winter Palace the Small Hermitage was planned by architects Yuri Velten and Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe, according to will and order of Catherine the Great. In addition to the apartment, the palace contained few halls filled with paintings, which prompted the empress to rename it Hermitage. Steady acquisitions of new art objects required more space, and Catherine commissioned Velten, who in 1771-1787 added the Old or Great Hermitage and found an interesting decision to unite it with the appearance of the neighboring buildings: the Great Hermitage, having no columns or pilasters, is distinguished with strict simplicity and monumentality. Then in 1779-1785 Giacomo Quarenghi constructed the Gallery of Loges and the building of the Hermitage Theater (1783-1787), which is notable for refined simplicity and clearness of the architectural compositions and antique-style interior decor. The New Hermitage designed for the "imperial Museum" by architect Leo von Klenze in 1842-1851 was the last element added to the architectural complex which is now one of the best sights in the historical centre of St. Petersburg and one of greatest museums in the world.
At present, The Hermitage holds the Guinness World Record as having the world's largest collection of paintings, including ones created by Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Rubens, van Dyck, Rembrandt, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Watteau, Tiepolo, Canaletto, Canova, Rodin, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, and Matisse. It's belongings boast over 3 million works of art - celebrated antique sculpture, monuments of culture and art of the European and Oriental peoples, Russian applied art, an assortment of Fabergé jewellery as well as over a million coins and medals, archaeological materials, the largest existing collection of ancient Scythian gold and the antiquities from Black Sea North Littoral.
