The Hermitage takes its name from the building erected for the Russian empress Catherine the Great in 1764-1765, adjacent to the imperial winter palace in St. Petersburg. The Hermitage comes from the French ‘ermitage’ meaning a retreat or isolation—and Catherine used it for this purpose. It became a place where she could escape the affairs of state, and where she could store, display, contemplate, and enjoy her growing collection of art.
The first classical statue in the Russian imperial collection was given to Czar Peter the Great in 1720 by Pope Clement XI. It was a Roman copy of the Hellenistic nude Taurian Venus, and while the Scythian artifacts in Peter’s kunstkammer (cabinet of curiosities) founded the prehistoric archaeological collections, this statue began the classical archaeological collections of what would become one of the great museums of Europe.
Like the other monarchs of western Europe in the seventeenth century, Czar Peter the Great was not only interested in the art of the Italian Renaissance and that of ancient Greece and Rome, but he was also preoccupied with acquiring examples and/or copies of it to enhance the status and taste of the Russian court. The collection of classical antiquities represented much of what Czar Peter wanted for Russia—for it to be an enlightened, modern, competitive, Westernized, and powerful European nation.
Peter and his successors continued to purchase paintings and sculpture to decorate their palaces. The Russian Academy of Fine Arts was established in 1757 as a department of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences by the empress Elizabeth. But it was Catherine the Great, Elizabeth’s successor, who not only drastically increased the royal collections but also acquired a slice of classical Greece for the Russians to excavate.
The Russian empress Catherine II (1729-1796), also known as “the Great,” began her career as a minor German princess, wife of a possible heir to the Russian throne who eventually became Czar Peter III. In 1762, supported by palace guards, she deposed, imprisoned, and assassinated her husband, seizing the throne for herself. Catherine ruled Russia from 1762 until 1796, the last of eighteenth-century Europe’s great art patrons, an enlightened monarch who, like Louis XIV of France, regarded art as inspirational as well as inseparable from national propaganda and politics and the promulgation of fame. Catherine established a royal picture gallery and reestablished the Academy of Fine Arts as a separate institution under Count Ivan Shuvalov (who also founded the first Russian university in Moscow for Catherine), endowing it with enough funds to support Russian artists, architects, and designers and to employ French experts to educate them. She also commissioned artworks for her palaces, pieces of state art, such as the large bronze statue of Peter the Great (engraved “To Peter the first from Catherine the second”), as well as many public and royal buildings.
In 1764 Catherine II bought 225 paintings from the Berlin dealer Johann Gotzkowsky, a collector for the Prussian emperor Frederick II, who was having financial difficulties. This major purchase was followed by a number of acquisitions via intermediaries such as Dmitry Golitsyn, the Russian ambassador to Paris and The Hague, and notable experts such as Dennis Diderot and Frederic Grimm. In 1768 the private collections of the Prince de Ligne and Count Karl Coblenz were bought in Brussels for the Hermitage. In 1769 the collections of the late Count Heinrich von Bruhl, art connoisseur and former chancellor to Augustus II, elector of Saxony and king of Poland, were acquired. In 1772 the Italian Renaissance collection of paintings by Raphael, Titian, Rubens, and others belonging to the French banker Baron Crozat made its way to St. Petersburg from Paris. In 1779 the outstanding collection of Sir Robert Walpole, prime minister to kings George I and George II of England, made the same journey, and so did the collection of the Parisian Count Badouin in 1783. At Catherine’s death, she had added 2,400 paintings to the collection.
Catherine II’s passion for collecting also encompassed terracotta statuettes, engravings, cameos, coins and medals, gemstones (10,000 of them), minerals, and 38,00 volumes for her library, including the complete libraries of Diderot and Voltaire.
As the collections expanded, so did the buildings around the winter palace on the banks of the River Neva. To the small Hermitage were added the old (or large Hermitage), the Raphael Loggia (its first floor a replica of the one painted by Raphael in the Vatican), and the Hermitage Theatre (a reproduction of the ancient theater in Vincenza). The quiet retreat full of paintings had metamorphosed into a vast palace of halls and galleries, stuffed full of decorative arts, furniture, paintings, sculptures, and other collections of smaller artifacts.
In 1852 Czar Nicholas I added a new museum building to the site called the New Hermitage and opened it to the public.
See also First Archaeological Collections in Russia (1715); Russia Gets a Slice of Classical Antiquity (1782).
Further Reading
Burbank, J., and D. L. Ransel. 1998. Imperial Russia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Paolucci, A. 2002. Great museums of Europe. Milan, Italy: Skira.
World History
