The Hermitage is probably the most well-known and famous attraction in St. Petersburg. It’s the Russian equivalent of the Louvre, containing over three million items including innumerable paintings, sculptures, busts, and more. In fact, the collection is so large that the Hermitage spans six buildings, though only four are open to the public. Due to time constraints, we only spent one day at the Hermitage and only in the main building (the Winter Palace): if you love art, you’d better schedule several days if you want to take it all in, and if you really love art that much there’s a separate Russian museum which contains only Russian artwork, as opposed to the Hermitage which contains a lot of European art and other collections from the ancient world.
|
|
|
| One of the many rooms in the Winter Palace. | The Raphael Loggias corridor created for Catherine the Great, which was copied from the Vatican. |
The Hermitage was founded under Catherine the Great when she purchased a collection of Flemish and Dutch paintings in 1764, and grew over the course of the Romanov Dynasty to its present state. The museum was opened to the public in 1852 and after the czars were overthrown in 1917 the Imperial Hermitage and Winter Palace were turned into state museums.
|
|
|
 | |
The museum has audio guides if you want to go more in depth, and if there’s a particular era or style that you are interested in seeing it’s best to look on the museum website or the maps within the museum to focus your visit and make the most of your time available. The ticket lines can get rather long, so you can get ticket vouchers in advance from their website (http://www.hermitagemuseum.org/html_En/index.html).
No comments:
Post a Comment