Saint Petersburg

The State
Hermitage Museum

The collections

Nearly three million works

Renowned for the astonishing quantity and quality of the artistic, historical and cultural heritage it holds, the State Hermitage Museum houses nearly 3 million works of art by the greatest masters of all time — from Filippo Lippi, Leonardo, Titian, Giorgione, Caravaggio, Rubens, Velázquez, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Tiepolo and Canova to Degas, Cézanne, Monet, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso — as well as exquisite goldsmiths’ work, furnishings, costumes and porcelain.

The Museum was born at the wish of Catherine II who, in a building adjoining the Winter Palace, had a retreat built, a “hermitage”, in which to gather the paintings she was steadily acquiring, above all in Europe. Very few were the chosen ones admitted to admire the works: all were required to enter without sword or hat, set aside their social rank, promise not to touch or break anything, speak softly and never yawn. Offenders faced a curious penalty: drinking water.

Leonardo da Vinci, Madonna Litta

Raphael · Italian collection

Pablo Picasso · Shchukin collection

Timeline

From private collection to museum

1764

The first core of the Empress’s collection: snatching it by a whisker from Frederick II of Prussia, Catherine buys 225 Flemish and Dutch paintings from the Berlin merchant Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky, including Frans Hals’s famous Portrait of a Man Holding a Glove. Thanks to the mandate she personally gave the Russian ambassadors in Rome, Paris, Amsterdam and London to seek out new works, the collection grows very rapidly.

1771–1851

As the number of works grows, so must the spaces that house them: between 1771 and 1779 the Great Hermitage is built; between 1783 and 1789 comes the Theatre, designed by Giacomo Quarenghi. It is only between 1839 and 1851, however, that the New Hermitage is created, conceived as a true museum building: the project is entrusted to the architect Franz Karl Leo von Klenze, who harmonises it with the Winter Palace.

1852

The Museum finally opens to the public, immediately after the acquisition — made in Venice — of the extraordinary Barbarigo collection, which brings to the Hermitage masterpieces of the calibre of Titian’s Saint Sebastian.

Today

The exhibition areas also include the Winter Palace, the sumptuous residence of the Romanovs completed in 1762 to a design by Bartolomeo Rastrelli and inhabited by the imperial family until 1904. Thanks to the recent acquisition of the magnificent General Staff Building, adjoining the historic site, the Saint Petersburg museum is set to become the largest exhibition space in the world.

Video

The museum in pictures

For more information about the museum and its collections, visit the official website.

The State Hermitage Museum