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The Hermitage Museum
The Hermitage in addition to being one of the most famous museums in the world is also the largest of all. As a matter of fact, its collection is made up of about three million works. Its huge architectural complex consists of 400 rooms enriched with precious decorations and spread in no less than five buildings, which were built between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, namely: the Winter Palace, the Small Hermitage, the Large Hermitage, the New Hermitage and the Hermitage Theatre.
The museum's collections are divided into the following sections: primitive cultures from the Palaeolithic to the Slavs, art of the eastern regions – which also houses a permanent exhibition on the ancient Egyptian culture, art of the Near and Middle East, classical antiquities, Russian culture and art, art of Western Europe - with rooms dedicated to Italian painting, oriental art and numismatic section. Inside there museum are kept works of all kinds, including painting, copper engraving, sculpture, decorative and applied art from Russia, Eastern Countries and Western Europe.
Visiting the rooms of the Hermitage, you can make a thorough journey back throughout the entire history of Italian painting, from Our Lady of the Annunciation by Simone Martini, the great Italian masters of the 15th century such as Botticelli, Filippo Lippi and Pietro Perugino, up to Leonardo, Raphael, Caravaggio, Titian and Tiepolo. Besides, you can to see masterpieces by the greatest painters of all time such as Monet, Van Gogh, Degas, Picasso, Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse, Renoir, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Rubens, Van Dyck and many others.
It was Peter the Great to buy the first paintings in Europe and the first sculptures that would then form the largest collection of masterpieces in the whole world. The purchase of the artworks went on with his daughter Elizabeth, but it was Catherine II of Russia in 1794 to found the museum and subsequently purchase numerous art collections in Paris and London. Also Alexander I and Nicholas I went on increasing the collections. After the outbreak of the October Revolution, heritage of the Hermitage was further enriched, quadrupling its works, so much so that Nicholas II, when he ascended to power in 1894, inherited the largest collection of artworks in Europe.
Since 1852 the museum became public, but initially a permit issued by the Ministry of the Imperial Court was required for the visit. Entry without restrictions came only in 1863.
During World War II, the museum was closed and thousands of works were transferred in secret to the Urals, while the furniture and the rest of the collections were hidden in the basement in order to protect them until the end of the war.
