Hermitage Museum

Stand on Palace Square and feel the paving stones underfoot. They are wide, worn and slightly uneven. Wind often comes off the Neva and sweeps across this open space. In front of you runs a long facade of pale green and white, crowded with columns and topped with a line of statues against the sky. That building is the Winter Palace. Behind and beside it stretches one of the largest art museums on Earth, the State Hermitage.

The Hermitage is not a single building. It is a chain of palaces and halls along the river embankment, joined by passages and galleries. The Winter Palace is the grandest of them. Beyond it stand the Small Hermitage, the Old Hermitage, the New Hermitage and the Hermitage Theatre. Across the square, the curved General Staff Building also belongs to the museum. Together they hold a collection usually counted at more than three million objects.

The Winter Palace you see today was designed by the Italian-born architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli for Empress Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great. It was finished in the early 1760s, in a style called Russian Baroque. Baroque means ornament, curves and drama, and Rastrelli used all three. Count the columns along the facade if you like. You will lose track quickly. That is part of the effect. The palace was built to make every visitor feel small before the power of the Russian crown.

Elizabeth did not live to enjoy it for long. The collection itself began with another empress, Catherine the Great. In 1764 she acquired a group of paintings from a Berlin merchant named Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky. He had gathered them for the King of Prussia, who could not pay. Catherine stepped in, and that purchase is treated as the founding moment of the museum. She kept buying. Whole private collections from across Europe travelled to Saint Petersburg by sea and by road.

Here is the first surprise. The word hermitage means a place of retreat, a home for a hermit. Catherine used it for her private galleries, where she could enjoy her paintings away from court ceremony. She is often quoted as saying that only she and the mice could admire them. That line appears in many books, but treat it as a well-loved story rather than a verified quote. What is certain is that the museum stayed private for decades.

The public gained real access in 1852, when the New Hermitage opened. It was designed by the German architect Leo von Klenze. If you walk around to Millionnaya Street, behind the palace complex, you will find its entrance portico. Ten grey granite giants, called Atlantes, hold up the roof on their shoulders. Locals say that rubbing a toe brings luck. Notice how polished some of those stone feet have become.

Inside, the scale changes your sense of time. The Jordan Staircase greets many visitors with white marble, gilded detail and a painted ceiling far overhead. It took its name from a ceremony at Epiphany, when the imperial family walked down to the Neva for the blessing of the waters. In 1837 a great fire swept through the Winter Palace and gutted much of the interior. The rooms were rebuilt, and many of the halls you walk through today date from that restoration.

The treasures are almost impossible to list. There are two small paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, the Benois Madonna and the Litta Madonna. There is a large group of works by Rembrandt, including The Return of the Prodigal Son. A father bends over his kneeling son, hands resting on his back. Many visitors stay in front of it longer than they planned. In the Pavilion Hall, a golden mechanical Peacock Clock by the English maker James Cox still stands, with an owl, a rooster and a peacock.

Now the second surprise. The Hermitage has cats. For a long time, cats have lived in the basements, protecting the collection from mice. Today they are cared for by staff and volunteers, and the museum even celebrates them with a special day. You are unlikely to meet one in the galleries. But somewhere below your feet, a small team of cats is probably asleep near a warm pipe.

This building has seen hard history too. In October 1917, during the Russian Revolution, revolutionary forces entered the Winter Palace, where the Provisional Government was meeting. The famous films of a dramatic storming made the event larger than it was in reality. Then, during the Second World War, Leningrad, as the city was called, lived through a long siege. Much of the collection was packed and sent east by train to the Urals for safety.

The staff who stayed behind lived in the cellars. Accounts from the siege describe empty frames left hanging on the walls after the paintings had gone. Some workers are said to have guided visitors through the bare rooms, describing from memory the art that once hung there. After the war, the works returned, and the frames were filled again. It is worth remembering this story as you walk past the canvases today.

A practical word about the visit. The museum is enormous, and no one sees it all in a single day. Choose two or three areas that matter to you before you go in. Many people start with the state rooms of the Winter Palace, then move to the Italian and Dutch paintings. For French Impressionists and later artists, such as Matisse and Monet, cross the square to the General Staff Building. Comfortable shoes are not optional here.

From inside, the river windows give some of the best views in the city. Look out across the Neva toward the Peter and Paul Fortress, with its thin golden spire, and toward the old stock exchange on the tip of Vasilievsky Island. The light over the water changes constantly. In summer, during the white nights, the sky barely darkens at all. In winter, the low sun turns the palace facade almost gold in the afternoon.

Before you leave, step back onto the square and look again. The tall Alexander Column stands in the middle, a single shaft of red granite marking the victory over Napoleon. Behind you, the arch of the General Staff Building frames the palace. Listen to the wind, the footsteps, the voices of tour groups in many languages. Kings and empresses lived here. Now it belongs to everyone who walks through the doors... including you.