Hermitage – Saint Petersburg
The first nucleus of the Hermitage, which will later become one of the most incredible and vast art galleries in the world, was a donation, by Catherine the Great, of works realized by the great masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
With the increase of the works of art acquired by Caterina, a great art collector, it was necessary to build a space exclusively dedicated to hosting the precious objects: the Queen then commissioned the construction of a building to house the most valuable pieces of the collection, the Little Hermitage (which according to the Old French language means “hermit”) annexed to the Winter Palace, the imperial residence. However, the building, in neoclassical style, wasn’t large enough to contain such an artistic heritage and, so, it was decided to build a three-storey building, the Grand Hermitage..
Currently the collections include masterpieces by artists such as Leonardo, Rubens, Rembrandt, Raphael and Titian, as well as sculptures by Rodin, Antonio Canova and Lorenzo Bartolini, but also pieces of archaeological importance, decorative arts, ancient weapons, numismatic and Russian and Eastern art.
