Hermitage Museum From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

State Hermitage Museum Winter Palace Established 1764 Location 38 Palace Embankment, Dvortsovy Municipal Okrug, Cental District, Saint Petersburg, Russia Coordinates 59.941°N 30.3129°E Visitors 2,879,686 (2011)[1] Ranked 1st nationally Ranked 12th globally Director Mikhail Piotrovsky Public transit access Spb metro line5.svg Admiralteyskaya station Website www.hermitagemuseum.org The State Hermitage (Russian: Госуда́рственный Эрмита́ж; IPA: [gəsʊˈdarstvʲɪnɨj ɪrmʲɪˈtaʂ], Gosudarstvenny Ermitazh) is a museum of art and culture in Saint Petersburg, Russia. One of the largest[2] and oldest museums in the world, it was founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great and has been open to the public since 1852. Its collections, of which only a small part is on permanent display, comprise nearly three million items,[3] including the largest collection of paintings in the world. The collections occupy a large complex of six historic buildings along Palace Embankment, including the Winter Palace, a former residence of Russian emperors. Apart from them, the Menshikov Palace, Museum of Porcelain, Storage Facility at Staraya Derevnya and the eastern wing of the General Staff Building are also part of the museum. The museum has several exhibition centers abroad. The Hermitage is a federal state property. Since 1990, the director of the museum has been Mikhail Piotrovsky. Of six buildings of the main museum complex, four, named the Winter Palace, Small Hermitage, Old Hermitage and New Hermitage, are partially open to the public. The other two are the Hermitage Theatre and the Reserve House. The entrance ticket for foreign tourists costs four-times as much as the fee paid by Russian citizens. However, the entrance is free of charge the first Thursday of every month for all visitors, and free daily for students and children. The museum is closed on Mondays. The entrance for individual visitors is located in the Winter Palace, accessible from the Courtyard. Contents 1 Buildings 2 Collections 2.1 Egyptian antiquities 2.2 Classical antiquities 2.3 Prehistoric art 2.4 Jewelry and decorative art 2.5 Italian Renaissance 2.6 Italian and Spanish fine art 2.7 Knight's Hall 2.8 Dutch Golden Age and Flemish Baroque 2.9 German, British, Swiss and French fine art 2.10 Russian art 2.11 Neoclassical, Impressionist, and post-Impressionist art 3 Gallery of Modern Art in the Hermitage 3.1 Henri Matisse, André Derain, Wassily Kandinsky 4 History 4.1 Origins: Catherine's collection 4.2 Expansion in the 19th century 4.3 After the October Revolution 4.4 The Hermitage since 1991 4.5 Hermitage directors 5 Volunteer service 6 Dependencies 6.1 Hermitage Amsterdam 6.2 Hermitage-Kazan Exhibition Center 6.3 Ermitage Italia, Ferrara 6.4 Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, Vilnius 6.5 Former dependencies 7 In popular culture 7.1 Films 7.2 Literature 7.3 Games 8 See also 9 Notes 10 References 11 External links Buildings Originally, the only building housing the collection was the Small Hermitage. Today, the Hermitage Museum encompasses many buildings on the Palace Embankment and its neighbourhoods. Apart from the Small Hermitage, the museum now also includes the Old Hermitage (also called Large Hermitage), the New Hermitage, the Hermitage Theatre, and the Winter Palace, the former main residence of the Russian tsars. In recent years, the Hermitage has expanded to the General Staff Building on the Palace Square in front of the Winter Palace, and the Menshikov Palace. The Hermitage Museum complex. From left to right: Hermitage Theatre – Old Hermitage – Small Hermitage – Winter Palace (the "New Hermitage" is situated behind the Old Hermitage). Collections Question book-new.svg This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (February 2011) The Western European Art collection includes European paintings, sculpture, and applied art from the 13th to the 20th century. It is displayed, in about 120 rooms, on the first and second floor of the four main buildings. Drawings and prints are displayed in temporary exhibitions. Egyptian antiquities Main article: Egyptian Collection of the Hermitage Museum Egyptian Hall Since 1940, the Egyptian collection, dating back to 1852 and including the former Castiglione Collection, has occupied a large hall on the ground floor in the eastern part of the Winter Palace. It serves as a passage to the exhibition of Classical Antiquities. A modest collection of the culture of Ancient Mesopotamia, including a number of Assyrian reliefs from Babylon, Dur-Sharrukin and Nimrud, is located in the same part of the building. Classical antiquities The collection of Classical Antiquities occupies most of the ground floor of the Old and New Hermitage buildings. The interiors of the ground floor were designed by German architect Leo von Klenze in the Greek revival style in the early 1850s, using painted polished stucco and columns of natural marble and granite. One of the largest and most notable interiors of the first floor is the Hall of Twenty Columns, divided into three parts by two rows of grey monolithic columns of Serdobol granite, intended for the display of Graeco-Etruscan vases. Its floor is made of a modern marble mosaic imitating ancient tradition, while the stucco walls and ceiling are covered in painting. The Room of the Great Vase in the western wing features the 2.57 m (8.4 ft) high Kolyvan Vase, weighting 19 t (42,000 lb), made of jasper in 1843 and installed before the walls were erected. While the western wing was designed for exhibitions, the rooms on the ground floor in the eastern wing of the New Hermitage, now also hosting exhibitions, were originally intended for libraries. The floor of the Athena Room in the south-eastern corner of the building, one of the original libraries, is decorated with an authentic 4th-century mosaic excavated in an early Christian basilica in Chersonesos in 1854. A red-figure vase in the Hall of Twenty Columns The collection of Classical Antiquities feature Greek artefacts from the 3rd millennium – 5th century BC, Ancient Greek pottery, items from the Greek cities of the North Pontic Greek colonies, Hellenistic sculpture and jewellery, including engraved gems and cameos, such as the famous Gonzaga Cameo, Italic art from the 9th to 2nd century BC, Roman marble and bronze sculpture and applied art from the 1st century BC - 4th century AD, including copies of Classical and Hellenistic Greek sculptures. One of the highlights of the collection is the Tauride Venus, which, according to latest research, is an original Hellenistic Greek sculpture rather than a Roman copy as it was thought before.[4] There are, however, only a few pieces of authentic Classical Greek sculpture and sepulchral monuments. Prehistoric art On the ground floor in the western wing of the Winter Palace the collections of prehistoric artifacts and the culture and art of the Caucasus are located, as well as the second treasure gallery. The prehistoric artifacts date from the Paleolithic to the Iron Age and were excavated all over Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union and Russian Empire. Among them is a renowned collection of the art and culture of nomadic tribes of the Altai from Pazyryk and Bashadar sites, including the world's oldest surviving knotted pile carpet and a well-preserved wooden chariot, both from the 4th–3rd centuries BC. The Caucasian exhibition includes a collection of Urartu artifacts from Armenia and Eastern Turkey. Many of them were excavated at Teishebaini under the supervision of Boris Piotrovsky, former director of the Hermitage Museum. Jewelry and decorative art Four small rooms on the ground floor, enclosed in the middle of the New Hermitage between the room displaying Classical Antiquities, comprise the first treasure gallery, featuring western jewellery from the 4th millennium BC to the early 20th century AD. The second treasure gallery, located on the ground floor in the southwest corner of the Winter Palace, features jewellery from the Pontic steppes, Caucasus and Asia, in particular Scythian and Sarmatian gold. Visitors may only visit the treasure galleries as part of a guided tour. The Pavilion Hall Pavilion Hall, designed by Andrei Stakenschneider in 1858, occupies the first floor of the Northern Pavilion in the Small Hermitage. It features the 18th-century golden Peacock Clock by James Cox and a collection of mosaics. The floor of the hall is adorned with a 19th-century imitation of an ancient Roman mosaic. Two galleries spanning the west side of the Small Hermitage from the Northern to Southern Pavilion house an exhibition of Western European decorative and applied art from the 12th to 15th century and the fine art of the Low Countries from the 15th and 16th centuries. Italian Renaissance The rooms on the first floor of the Old Hermitage were designed by Andrei Stakenschneider in revival styles in between 1851 and 1860, although the design survives only in some of them. They feature works of Italian Renaissance artists, including Giorgione, Titian, Veronese, as well as Benois Madonna and Madonna Litta attributed to Leonardo da Vinci or his school. The Small Italian Skylight Room The Italian Renaissance galleries continues in the eastern wing of the New Hermitage with paintings, sculpture, majolica and tapestry from Italy of the 15th–16th centuries, including Conestabile Madonna and Madonna with Beardless St. Joseph by Raphael. The gallery known as the Raphael Loggias, designed by Giacomo Quarenghi and painted by Cristopher Unterberger and his workshop in the 1780s as a replication of the loggia in the Apostolic Palace in Rome frescoed by Raphael, runs along the eastern facade. Italian and Spanish fine art The first floor of New Hermitage contains three large interior spaces in the center of the museum complex with red walls and lit from above by skylights. These are adorned with 19th-century Russian lapidary works and feature Italian and Spanish canvases of the 16th-18th centuries, including Veronese, Tintoretto, Velázquez and Murillo. In the enfilade of smaller rooms alongside the skylight rooms the Italian and Spanish fine art of the 15th-17th centuries, including Michelangelo's Crouching Boy and paintings by El Greco. The museum also houses paintings by Luis Tristan, Francisco de Zurbaran, Alonso Cano, Jose de Ribera and Goya. Knight's Hall The Knights' Hall, a large room in the eastern part of the New Hermitage originally designed in the Greek revival style for the display of coins, now hosts a collection of Western European arms and armour from the 15th-17th centuries, part of the Hermitage Arsenal collection. The Hall of Twelve Columns, in the southeast corner of the New Hermitage, is adorned with columns of grey Serdobol granite and was also designed in the Greek revival style for the display of coins, is now used for temporary exhibitions. The Three Graces by Canova The Gallery of the History of Ancient Painting adjoins the Knights' Hall and also flanks the skylight rooms. It was designed by Leo von Klenze in the Greek revival style as a prelude to the museum and features neoclassical marble sculptures by Antonio Canova and his followers. In the middle, the gallery opens to the main staircase of the New Hermitage, which served as the entrance to the museum before the October Revolution of 1917, but is now closed. The upper gallery of the staircase is adorned with twenty grey Serdobol granite columns and feature 19th-century European sculpture and Russian lapidary works. Dutch Golden Age and Flemish Baroque The Rubens Room. The rooms and galleries along the southern facade and in the western wing of the New Hermitage are now entirely devoted to Dutch Golden Age and Flemish Baroque painting of the 17th century, including the large collections of van Dyck, Rubens and Rembrandt. They also contain several paintings by Jan Brueghel the Elder (Velvet period), Frans Snyders (for example, "The Fish Market"), Gerard Terborch, Paulus Potter, Jan Van Goyen, Ferdinand Bol and Gerard van Honthorst. German, British, Swiss and French fine art The first floor rooms on the southern facade of the Winter Palace are occupied by the collections of German fine art of the 16th century and French fine art of the 15th–18th centuries, including paintings by Poussin, Lorrain, Watteau. The collections of French decorative and applied art from the 17th–18th centuries and British applied and fine art from the 16th–19th century, including Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds, are on display in nearby rooms facing the courtyard. This area also holds paintings by German artists, including Hans Wertinger, Cranach the Elder, Barthel Bruyn the Elder, Caspar David Friedrich ("Moonrise Over Sea"), Anton Mengs, Hans Thoma, Anselm Feuerbach, Franz Stuck ("Two Men Fighting Over a Woman") and Heinrich Campendonck as well as paintings by Swiss painters Angelica Kauffmann, Alexandre Calame, Arnold Bocklin and Ferdinand Hodler. Russian art The richly decorated interiors of the first floor of the Winter Palace on its eastern, northern and western sides are part of the Russian culture collection and host the exhibitions of the Russian art of the 11th-19th centuries. Temporary exhibitions are usually held in the Nicholas Hall. Neoclassical, Impressionist, and post-Impressionist art One of Vincent van Gogh's last paintings, White House at Night, was revealed to be in the possession of the Hermitage in 1995, after being considered lost for decades. The only portion of the second floor open to the public is in the Winter Palace. French Neoclassical, Impressionist and post-Impressionist art, including works by Renoir, Monet, Van Gogh and Gauguin, is displayed there in the southeastern corner. It also displays paintings by Camille Pissarro (Boulevard Montmartre, Paris), Paul Cézanne (Mount Sainte-Victoire), Alfred Sisley, Henri Morel, and Degas. Modern art is displayed in the rooms on the southern side of the second floor. It features Matisse, Derain and other fauvists, Picasso, Malevich, Kandinsky, Giacomo Manzù, Giorgio Morandi and Rockwell Kent. A small room is devoted to the German Romantic art of the 19th century, including several paintings by Caspar David Friedrich. The second floor of the Western wing features collections of the Oriental art (from China, India, Mongolia, Tibet, Central Asia, Byzantium and Near East).