Hermitage Museum

Interesting facts

The Kolyvan Vase, carved from a single block of Altai jasper, weighs about 19 tonnes and was installed before the walls of its room were built around it.

In 1745 Empress Elizabeth ordered some thirty large mousers brought from Kazan to the Winter Palace, beginning the museum's long tradition of resident cats.

Roughly a third of the museum's more than three million items are coins, medals and other numismatic objects.

Recent research suggests the Tauride Venus is an original Hellenistic Greek sculpture rather than a later Roman copy, as long assumed.

Leonardo's Madonna Litta entered the collection in 1865, while his Benois Madonna arrived only in 1914, bought from the Benois family.

Catherine the Great had Giacomo Quarenghi build a full-scale copy of Raphael's Vatican loggias, completed in 1792 with their painted decoration reproduced.

The Hermitage Theatre, built by Quarenghi in 1783–1787 for Catherine's court, still stages performances beside the Winter Palace.

In 1995 the museum first displayed 74 paintings taken from Germany by Soviet forces in 1945, most of them from the Otto Krebs collection, hidden for fifty years.

With about 2.8 million visitors in 2022, it ranked among the ten most visited art museums in the world.

Why it is worth it

The State Hermitage began as a private indulgence. In 1764 Catherine the Great bought a collection of paintings assembled by the Berlin merchant Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky for Frederick II of Prussia, who could no longer afford it after the Seven Years' War — among them Rembrandt's Danaë and Frans Hals's portrait of a young man with a glove. She housed them in a private wing beside the Winter Palace, her "hermitage", and went on buying entire collections: Brühl in Saxony, Crozat in Paris with Diderot's help, Robert Walpole's pictures from Houghton. The museum still marks its birthday on 7 December, St Catherine's Day. A public museum followed only in 1852, when the New Hermitage by the German architect Leo von Klenze opened its doors.

Today the core of the museum is a chain of buildings along Palace Embankment. The Winter Palace, the Romanovs' official residence, was built largely to designs by Bartolomeo Rastrelli in Elizabethan Baroque, its green-and-white main façade running about 215 metres; much of its interior was remade after a fire in 1837. Beside it come the Small Hermitage of Yury Felten and Vallin de la Mothe, the Old Hermitage, Klenze's New Hermitage, and the Hermitage Theatre. Across Palace Square, the eastern wing of the General Staff Building holds the Impressionists, Post-Impressionists and twentieth-century art — Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, Malevich.

The collection runs to more than three million items, only a fraction on display at any time. Highlights include two Madonnas attributed to Leonardo, Raphael's Conestabile Madonna, a deep Rembrandt and Rubens holding, the Tauride Venus, Scythian gold, the Pazyryk carpet from the Altai — the oldest known knotted-pile carpet — and James Cox's gilded Peacock Clock in the Pavilion Hall. In 1941 much of the collection was evacuated by train to Sverdlovsk and returned in 1945. The museum keeps a colony of cats, who have become an attraction in their own right.

A single visit covers a small part of it. Pick two or three sections, arrive early, and leave time for the state rooms of the Winter Palace, which are as much an exhibit as anything hung on their walls.

Getting there

The main entrance is through the courtyard of the Winter Palace on Palace Square, in the centre of Saint Petersburg (about 0.2 km from the city centre point). Pulkovo Airport (LED) is about 16 km away. Admiralteyskaya metro station was opened in 2011 partly to serve the museum district.

From the encyclopaedia

The State Hermitage Museum is a museum of art and culture in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and holds the largest collection of paintings in the world. It was founded in 1764 when Empress Catherine the Great acquired a collection of paintings from the Berlin merchant Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky. The museum celebrates the anniversary of its founding each year on 7 December, Saint Catherine's Day. It has been open to the public since 1852. The Art Newspaper ranked the museum 10th in their list of the most visited art museums, with 2,812,913 visitors in 2022.

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Hermitage Museum

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia