Western European Painting in the Hermitage [antikvár]

The Hermitage, one of the largest and oldest museums in the world, has come a long way from its position as a "place of seclusion" (the French hermitage, whence its name) in the palace of the Russian Empress to its present-day standing of an Immensely popular national museum. Today the museum occupies five buildings, each one an architectural masterpiece. Four of these are stretched out in a line on the left bank of the Neva in the centre of Leningrad: the Winter Palace, built in 1762 by Francesco Barto-lommeo Rastrelli; the Small Hermitage, designed by Vallin de la Mothe in 1769; the Big Hermitage, designed by Yuri Velten and completed in 1784; and the Hermitage Theatre, put up by Giacomo Quarenghi and linked to the Big Hermitage by an arched bridge over the Winter Canal. The façade of the New Hermitage, the fifth building erected in 1851 to a design by Leo von Klenze, overlooks Khalturin (formerly Millionnaya) Street, which runs parallel to the Neva. The portico of the New Hermitage is adorned by ten huge figures of atlantes hewn out of granite by Russian craftsmen under the supervision of Alexander Terebenev. The Hermitage today is virtually a museum of the history of culture — from its very dawn, the Stone Age, to modern times. It consists of six major departments which have on display relics of prehistoric culture (for the most part archaeological finds discovered in the territory of the Soviet Union), the culture of antiquity (including treasures from excavations of ancient Greek and Roman settlements on the Northern Black Sea coast), the culture of the peoples of the East (beginning with the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia), Russian culture. Western European art (painting, drawing, sculpture, and applied art), and numismatics (coins, medals and orders). The entire exposition is housed in 353 rooms. Each year the Hermitage stages no less than twenty temporary exhibitions of art works drawn from its own limitless stocks or loaned by foreign museums. The Hermitage collection of Western European painting enjoys world renown. Most richly represented are the French, Italian, Flemish, and Dutch schools, which were especially popular in Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the collection was being assembled.