Among the world’s most outstanding art museums one of the first places is taken by the State Hermitage in Saint Petersburg. It is the greatest museum of the Russia: its vast and miscellaneous collections take nowadays a block of four buildings; its rooms, if stretched in one line, would measure many miles in total length, while they cover an area of 94 240 square metres. Over 300 rooms are open to the public and contain a rich selection from the Museum’s collections numbering over 2300000 items. The earliest exhibits date from 500000—300000 Ð’. C, the latest — from our days.
All the Museum exhibits are distributed among seven departments which are subdivided into forty permanent exhibitions. Continue Reading »
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THE STATE HERMITAGE
THE MAKING OF THE COLLECTION
Although visited now by thousands of people the Museum traditionally retains the old name — “The Hermitage” — attached to it in the 1760′s, which means “a hermit’s dwelling”, or “a solitary place”. This name originated in the fact that the Hermitage was founded as a palace museum accessible only to the nearest of the near to the court.
Some art treasures, of which but a small part was incorporated with the later museum collections, were purchased in different countries by Peter 1. These were, e. g., antique statues, marine landscapes, some pieces of Chinese applied art, collection of Siberian gold buckles from the 4th to the 1st centuries Ð’. C. Continue Reading »