The Stage Hermitage Museum Part 1:

The State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg is one of the largest museums in the world, housing over three million works of art and tracing the development of culture from prehistoric times to the present day. Highlights include Italian Renaissance art, in particular works by Michelangelo and Raphael, Flemish and Dutch painting, French Impressionist painting, and collections of Russian and Oriental art. The foundation of the collection stems from a purchase, in 1764 by Catherine the Great, of a considerable group of Western European paintings. First opened to the public in 1852, the State Hermitage Museum has belonged to the Russian people since the October Revolution in 1917; one of the five buildings in which it is housed is the magnificent Winter Palace, the former residence of the Russian Tsars.

From the 1760s onwards the Winter Palace was the main residence of the Russian Tsars. Magnificently located on the bank of the Neva River, this Baroque-style palace is perhaps St. Petersburg’s most impressive attraction. Many visitors also know it as the main building of the Hermitage Museum. The green-and-white three-storey palace is a marvel of Baroque architecture and boasts 1,786 doors, 1,945 windows and 1,057 elegantly and lavishly decorated halls and rooms, many of which are open to the public.

The Winter Palace was built between 1754 and 1762 for Empress Elizabeth, the daughter of Peter the Great. Unfortunately, Elizabeth died before the palace’s completion and only Catherine the Great and her successors were able to enjoy the sumptuous interiors of Elizabeth’s home. Many of the palace’s impressive interiors have been remodeled since then, particularly after 1837, when a huge fire destroyed most of the building. Today the Winter Palace, together with four more buildings arranged side by side along the river embankment, houses the extensive collections of the Hermitage. The Hermitage Museum is the largest art gallery in Russia and is among the largest and most respected art museums in the world.

The Hermitage, the world-renowned art museum on the banks of the River Neva, is the pride of Russia and its northern capital, St. Petersburg. It contains incalculable treasures of world culture. In the Hermitage collections there are some three million separate items. They are works of art and culture of the peoples of East and West spanning an immense period of time from deep antiquity to the twentieth century. All forms of artistic creativity, a multitude of different facets of world culture, are represented in the museum's stocks. Archaeological items inform us about the oldest cultures of the ancient World, the East and Russia. Extremely rich collections of paintings, graphic art and sculpture give an outstanding picture of the history of fine art from the rock drawings of primitive peoples to the painted vases and sculpture of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, from early Christian art - the Fayum portraits and Byzantine icons - to the great masters of the Italian Renaissance, from the Classical schools of the seventeenth century - the "Golden Age" of Western European art - to the French Impressionists and the leading figures of the twentieth century, from the painting of China and Tibet to the miniatures of India and Iran. The wealth of the Hermitage's collections of applied art is inexhaustible - Ancient pottery and Chinese porcelain, the gold of the Scythians and the Ancient Greeks, Persian carpets and European tapestries, the silver of the remote Sassanid kingdom and of the eighteenth-century craftsmen of Paris and Augsburg, clothing, furniture, jewellery and much else besides. Almost a million coins and medals, from ancient times to the present day, belong to the Hermitage's numismatic department. Glistening in this vast "ocean" are the masterpieces of Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Giorgione, Raphael, Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, Velazquez, Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso.