State Hermitage Museum
Imperial Winter Palace and four adjoining buildings holding one of the world's largest art collections.
The Hermitage grew out of the private collection that Catherine the Great began assembling in 1764, housed in pavilions added beside the Winter Palace, Bartolomeo Rastrelli's Elizabethan Baroque residence of the Russian emperors completed in 1762. Leo von Klenze's purpose-built New Hermitage opened to the public in 1852, making it one of the earliest public art museums in Europe. After 1917 the imperial apartments and nationalised private collections were absorbed into the museum, which today occupies five linked buildings on Palace Square and the Neva embankment.
The holdings run to roughly three million items covering prehistory to the twentieth century, among them Scythian gold, Egyptian antiquities, Greek and Roman sculpture, and a painting gallery with works by Leonardo, Raphael, Titian, Rembrandt, Velazquez and Rubens. The Impressionist and modern collections, including Matisse and Picasso, are displayed across Palace Square in the General Staff building. Other branches include the Menshikov Palace, the Winter Palace of Peter the Great, the Museum of the Imperial Porcelain Factory and the Staraya Derevnya open-storage centre.
Highlights
- Rastrelli's Winter Palace and the ceremonial Jordan Staircase
- Leonardo's Benois and Litta Madonnas and Rembrandt's Return of the Prodigal Son
- The eighteenth-century Peacock Clock in the Pavilion Hall
- Impressionist and modern galleries in the General Staff building
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