The Hermitage [antikvár]

THE HISTORY The Hermitage, one of the largest and oldest museums in the OF THE GALLERY world, has come a long way from its position as a "place of seclusion" (the French ermitage, whence its name) in the palace of the Russian Empress to its present-day standing as an immensely popular national museum. Though in 1778, referring to the Hermitage treasures in a letter to a French correspondent, Catherine II could say: "The only ones to admire all this are the mice and me," and even after it became a "public" museum in 1852 the far from numerous visitors could get admission tickets only from the court office, today the Hermitage is visited annually by over three and a half million people. At the present time the museum occupies five buildings, each an architectural masterpiece. Four ot these are stretched out in a line on the left bank of the Neva in the center of Leningrad: the Winter Palace, built in 1762 by Rastrelli; the Small Hermitage, designed by Vallin de La Mothe in 1769; the Big (or Old) Hermitage, designed by Velten and completed in 1784; and the Hermitage Theatre, built by Quarenghi and linked to the Big Hermitage by an arched bridge over the Winter Canal. The façade of the fifth building, the New Hermitage, built by Stasov and Yefimov in 1851 from a design by Leo von Klenze, fronts Khalturin (formerly Millionnaya) Street, which runs parallel to the Neva. The portico of the New Hermitage is adorned by ten huge figures of atlantes hewn out of granite by Russian craftsmen under the supervision of Terebenev. The Hermitage today is virtually a museum ot the history ot culture — from its very dawn, the Stone Age, to modern times. It consists of six major departments which have on display relics of prehistoric culture (for the most part archaeological finds discovered in the territory of the Soviet Union), the culture of antiquity (including treasures coming from excavations of ancient Greek and Roman settlements on the Northen Black Sea coast), the culture of the peoples of the East (beginning with the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia), Russian culture, Western European art (painting, drawing, sculpture and applied art), and numismatics (coins, medals and orders) . The entire exposition is housed in 353 rooms. Each year the Hermitage stages no less than twenty temporary exhibitions drawn from its own limitless stocks or loaned by foreign museums. The Hermitage collection of Western European painting enjoys world renown. Most richly represented are the French, Italian, Flemish and Dutch schools, which were especially popular in Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the period when the collection was being assembled. Pictures by famous European masters graced the residences of Russian emperors beginning in the early eighteenth century. In 1716, for example, Peter the Great purchased in Amsterdam for his Peterhof palace a number of works by Dutch artists, including Rembrandt's David's Farewell to Jonathan. A rich collection of European paintings was housed also in the Catherine Palace erected in 1756 in Tsarskoye Selo (now the town of Pushkin).