ST PETERSBURG DAY 5, THE HERMITAGE

Can you feel it, our trip drawing to a close?  That means it is time for the "Big Finish."  If you are in St. Petersburg, the Big Finish is the Hermitage.

The Госуда́рственный Эрмита́ж (or Gosudarstvenny Ermitazh -- go ahead, sound it out!) is one of the largest and oldest museums in the world.  It was founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great house her burgeoning collection of artworks.  Other than religious icons, there was no tradition of art in Russia  before Peter the Great.  He collected some work of European artists, but Catherine was a regular shopaholic, buying other whole collections as they became available.  She did not intend for the Hermitage to be part of her public life, saying that only she "and the mice" would see her collections.

There must have been a lot of mice.

Now the Hermitage is six buildings, and its collections comprise over three million items, including the largest collection of paintings in the world.After spending a day there, we can attest that even that barely scratches the surface. 

 

Group tours are required to follow a specific path through the various buildings.  One is so turned around as we darted from one gallery to the next that we would have needed bread crumbs to find out way back.  But our guides made sure that we saw the highlights in the morning, and we had some time in the afternoon to revisit a few, and see some ones.  The museum is built is such a way, though, that at the time we decided we had enough. it took over 45 minutes to find a way from the third floor down to the first in the same corner of the same building.  So if you go, take break crumbs, a compass, and a working GPS.

Oh, and did I mention that it was quite hot, and very crowded?  In some of the smaller galleries, our guide would focus us on one painting while another group looked at another in the opposite direction.  When each was done, we would all mill around changing places. There may not be any way to avoid the crowds, however.  I can only imagine what it is like on the one free day a month.   

The opulence is staggering.  I was particularly intrigued by chandeliers throughout the trip; in a later post I'll concentrate on them.  In this series of palaces I noticed that every room had a different style of chandelier -- and sometimes would have two or three different versions of the same style in a room.  Every room had a different type of molding and decoration, and all of it drenched in gold and draped in carvings, frescoes and reliefs. It would be worth a day, or maybe a week, just to look at the buildings and their decoration.

The collections are so extensive that it becomes a game of numbers -- 40 Rubens, 35 Rembrandts.  No Vermeers, though, for which I am grateful.  If there had been any Vermeers I would have had to hire a guide just to find them.

Here is a small -- and I mean small -- sample of the rooms of the Hermitage:

 

Get the idea? 

I usually do not photograph art, since much better photos are readily available.  But as our guides had said, much of the art in Russia is unknown to westerners, since the art was cut off during the cold war, and even now does not often travel.  And it may be that the provenance of many of the pieces obtained around WWII is a little cloudy, to say the least, and traveling might raise unpleasant issues.  So I took a few photos, just to remind myself what we had seen.

Our group tour ended at the Pavilion Hall.  The flood of natural light from the many windows show off the intricate filigree and open-work details, and the many gold decorations. 

The highlight of the room is the peacock clock, a clock contained in a gold and glass cage.  The clock itself is a peacock, squirrel and a number of other animals and insects.  When the clock strikes, they all move.  However, to preserve the workings, the clock only rings once a month or so, when the crowds must be even more enormous.

After the group tour we headed for the cafeteria for sandwiches, and a refreshing beverage.

Then we went out on our own to retrace some of our steps to spend more time in exhibits we had already seen, and see a few others. The most interesting for me was a series of rooms of furnishings of the various tsars.  The program explained that since each tsar obviously had the money to live in any style he wished, each one adopted a different style. 

(This one's for you, Ginny!)

After our 45 minute escape attempt, we found benches near our exit and rested a bit before venturing out to the heat, then across the huge central plaza to the air-conditioned bus.  I took a last look at the Hermitage arch.  

But our day was not quite over....