How many items are in the Hermitage museum collection?
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Hermitage Revealed is a documentary film directed by Margy Kinmonth and produced by Foxtrot Films Ltd which tells the story of the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg - formerly a royal palace and now one of the largest and most visited museums in the world. Holding over 3 million objects and with more curators than any other museum, the exhibits go back to Catherine the Great. Celebrating the museum's 250th anniversary in 2014, the film shows how the collection came about, how it survived revolutionary times and what makes the Hermitage Museum unique today.
Hermitage Revealed
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Its collections, of which only a small part is on permanent display, comprise over three million items (the numismatic collection accounts for about one-third of them), including the largest collection of paintings in the world. The collections occupy a large complex of six historic buildings along Palace Embankment, including the Winter Palace, a former residence of Russian emperors. Apart from them, the Menshikov Palace, Museum of Porcelain, Storage Facility at Staraya Derevnya, and the eastern wing of the General Staff Building are also part of the museum. The museum has several exhibition centers abroad. The Hermitage is a federal state property. Since July 1992, the director of the museum has been Mikhail Piotrovsky.
Hermitage Museum
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The collection was established in 1852, the year the museum was made open to the public, when it purchased the collection of statuettes from Countess Alexandra Lavalle, previously stored in her mansion on English Embankment, and received the items collected in Egypt by Maximilian, Duke of Leuchtenberg, including two black basalt sarcophagi of the Late Period, now displayed in the middle of the hall, as well as the sculpture group of Theban governor Amenemheb with his wife and mother (14th century BC). In 1853 the statue of Sekhmet (15th century BC), brought by Alexei Norov from Theban Necropolis of the Eleventh dynasty of Egypt in the 1830s, was moved from the Imperial Academy of Arts to the Hermitage. Some items were purchased for the museum from antiquities traders in Egypt and collections of Russian merchants or received as gifts. In 1862 the collection expanded significantly, as the Castiglione collection, which was purchased by the Imperial Academy of Sciences from Carlo Ottavio Castiglione in Milan in 1826 and consisted of more than 900 items, core of the Egyptian museum of the Kunstkamera, was transferred to the Hermitage. However, there were no Egyptologists in Russia at that time. Vladimir Golenishchev became the first Russian egyptologist and started to work in the Hermitage in the 1870s. At the insistence of Golenishchev in 1881 the remainder of the Egyptian museum of the Kunstkamera was moved to the Hermitage. The Hermitage collection continued to grow in the 1880s, when Coptic written monuments and two fragments of Egyptian water clocks were acquired. In 1891 Golenishchev published the first complete inventory of the collection. Since the 1870s Golenishchev had collected an impressive private Egyptian collection, which was sold to the Pushkin Museum in Moscow in 1909, shortly before he emigrated. For a few years, as the building for the Moscow museum was being constructed, the items were also stored in the Hermitage. Soviet orientalist Vasily Struve was in charge of the Hermitage's Egyptian collection from 1918 to 1933. The highlights of the exhibition include the mummy of priest Petese (10th century BC) and a fragment of a tablet of Ramesses II's peace treaty with the Hittites (13th century BC).
Egyptian Collection of the Hermitage Museum
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In 1928, the Soviet government ordered the Hermitage to compile a list of valuable works of art for export. In 1930–1934, over two thousand works of art from the Hermitage collection were clandestinely sold at auctions abroad or directly to foreign officials and businesspeople. The sold items included Raphael's "Alba Madonna", Titian's "Venus with a Mirror", and Jan van Eyck's "Annunciation", among other world known masterpieces by Botticelli, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, and others. In 1931, after a series of negotiations, Andrew W. Mellon acquired 21 works of art from the Hermitage and later donated to form a nucleus of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (see also Soviet sale of Hermitage paintings).
With the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, before the Siege of Leningrad started, two trains with a considerable part of the collections were evacuated to Sverdlovsk. Two bombs and a number of shells hit the museum buildings during the siege. The museum opened an exhibition in November 1944. In October 1945 the evacuated collections were brought back, and in November 1945 the museum reopened.
Hermitage Museum
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The Egyptian Collection of the Hermitage Museum dates back to 1852 and includes items from the Predynastic Period to the 12th century AD. It belongs to the Oriental Art section of the museum. The Egyptian exposition is hosted in a single large hall on the ground floor on the eastern side of the Winter Palace. The hall serves as a passage to the exhibition of Classical Antiquities in other Hermitage buildings and is situated right under St. George's Hall. It was redesigned for the exhibition by Alexander Sivkov in 1940 and earlier served as the main buffet of the Winter Palace.
Egyptian Collection of the Hermitage Museum
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Originally, the only building housing the collection was the "Small Hermitage". Today, the Hermitage Museum encompasses many buildings on the Palace Embankment and its neighbourhoods. Apart from the Small Hermitage, the museum now also includes the "Old Hermitage" (also called "Large Hermitage"), the "New Hermitage", the "Hermitage Theatre", and the "Winter Palace", the former main residence of the Russian tsars. In recent years, the Hermitage has expanded to the General Staff Building on the Palace Square facing the Winter Palace, and the Menshikov Palace.
Hermitage Museum
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Catherine acquired the best collections offered for sale by the heirs of prominent collectors. In 1769, she purchased Brühl's collection, consisting of over 600 paintings and a vast number of prints and drawings, in Saxony. Three years later, she bought Crozat's collection of paintings in France with the assistance of Denis Diderot. Next, in 1779, she acquired the collection of 198 paintings that once belonged to Robert Walpole in London followed by a collection of 119 paintings in Paris from Count Baudouin in 1781. Catherine’s favorite items to collect were believed to be engraved gems and cameos. At the inaugural exhibit of the Hermitage, opened by the Prince of Wales in November 2000, there was an entire gallery devoted to representing and displaying Catherine's favorite items. In this gallery her cameos are displayed along with cabinet made by David Roentgen, which holds her engraved gems. As the symbol of Minerva was frequently used and favored by Catherine to represent her patronage of the arts, a cameo of Catherine as Minerva is also displayed here. This particular cameo was created for her by her daughter-in-law, the Grand Duchess Maria Fyodorovna. This is only a small representation of Catherine's vast collection of many antique and contemporary engraved gems and cameos.
The collection soon overgrew the building. In her lifetime, Catherine acquired 4,000 paintings from the old masters, 38,000 books, 10,000 engraved gems, 10,000 drawings, 16,000 coins and medals and a natural history collection filling two galleries, so in 1771 she commissioned Yury Felten to build another major extension. The neoclassical building was completed in 1787 and has come to be known as the Large Hermitage or Old Hermitage. Catherine also gave the name of the Hermitage to her private theatre, built nearby between 1783 and 1787 by the Italian architect Giacomo Quarenghi. In London in 1787, Catherine acquired the collection of sculpture that belonged to Lyde Browne, mostly Ancient Roman marbles. Catherine used them to adorn the Catherine Palace and park in Tsarskoye Selo, but later they became the core of the Classical Antiquities collection of the Hermitage. From 1787 to 1792, Quarenghi designed and built a wing along the Winter Canal with the Raphael Loggias to replicate the loggia in the Apostolic Palace in Rome designed by Donato Bramante and frescoed by Raphael. The loggias in Saint Petersburg were adorned with copies of Vatican frescoes painted by Cristopher Unterberger and his workshop in the 1780s.
Hermitage Museum
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Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Piotrovsky advocated the opening of the Hermitage collections to the wider world, which resulted in the establishment of the Hermitage Rooms in Somerset House, Hermitage Amsterdam and the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum. His tenure was not entirely free of scandals, however. After the museum announced in July 2006 that 221 minor items, including jewelry, Orthodox icons, silverware and richly enameled objects, had been stolen by one of the museum officials, there were calls for Piotrovsky's resignation.
Mikhail Piotrovsky
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The exhibit was the first display in The Netherlands of works from the Hermitage Museum's collections of French paintings of the late 19th and early 20th century. The collection was started by Russian collectors Morozov and Shchukin. The exhibit contained hundreds of masterpieces by artists who pioneered Modernism, including Matisse, Van Dongen, De Vlaminck, Derain and Picasso. It looked at the concept of Modernism from a historical perspective and examined how artists joined the new movement. The guest curator for the exhibit was Henk van Os, Professor at the University of Amsterdam and chairman of the Specialists Council of the Hermitage Amsterdam.
Hermitage Amsterdam
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The museum announced in July 2006, that 221 minor items, including jewelry, Orthodox icons, silverware and richly enameled objects, had been stolen. The value of the stolen items was estimated to be approximately $543,000 but by the end of 2006 several of the stolen items were recovered.
Hermitage Museum