Jewellery and decorative art

Four small rooms on the ground floor, enclosed in the middle of the New Hermitage between the room displaying Classical Antiquities, comprise the first treasure gallery, featuring western jewellery from the 4th millennium BC to the early 20th century AD. The second treasure gallery, located on the ground floor in the southwestern corner of the Winter Palace, features jewellery from the Pontic steppes, Caucasus and Asia, in particular Scythian and Sarmatian gold. Only guided visits to the treasure galleries are allowed.

On the first floor, the Pavilion Hall, designed by Andrei Stakenschneider in 1858, occupies the Northern Pavilion of the Small Hermitage. It features the 18th-century golden Peacock Clock by James Cox and a collection of mosaics. The floor of the hall is adorned with a 19th-century imitation of an ancient Roman mosaic.

Two galleries running along the western side of the Small Hermitage from the Northern to Southern Pavilion house an exhibition of Western European decorative and applied art of the 12th to 15th century and the fine art of the Low Countries from the 15th and 16th centuries.

Italian Renaissance

The rooms on the first floor of the Old Hermitage were designed by Andrei Stakenschneider in revival styles in 1851-1860, although the design survived only in some of them. They feature works of Italian Renaissance artists, including Giorgione, Titian, Veronese, as well as Benois Madonna and Madonna Litta attributed to Leonardo da Vinci or his school.

The Italian Renaissance exposition continues in the eastern wing of the New Hermitage with paintings, sculpture, majolica and tapestry from Italy of the 15th–16th centuries, including Conestabile Madonna and Madonna with Beardless St. Joseph by Raphael. The gallery known as the Raphael Loggias, designed by Giacomo Quarenghi and painted by Cristopher Unterberger and his workshop in the 1780s as a replication of the loggia in the Apostolic Palace in Rome frescoed by Raphael, runs along the eastern facade.

Italian and Spanish fine art

There are three large interiors with red walls lit by a skylight from above enclosed in the middle of the Hermitage complex on the first floor of the New Hermitage. They are adorned with 19th-century Russian lapidary works and feature Italian and Spanish canvases of the 16th-18th centuries, including Veronese, Tintoretto, Velázquez and Murillo. In the enfilade of smaller rooms alongside the skylight rooms the Italian and Spanish fine art of the 15th-17th centuries, including Michelangelo's Crouching Boy and paintings by El Greco.

Knight's Hall

The Knights' Hall, a large room in the eastern part of the New Hermitage originally designed in the Greek revival style for the display of coins, now hosts a collection of Western European arms and armour of the 15th-17th centuries, part of the Hermitage Arsenal collection. The Hall of Twelve Columns in the southeastern corner of the New Hermitage, adorned with columns of grey Serdobol granite, which is also designed in the Greek revival style and was originally intended for the display of coins, is now used for temporary exhibitions.

The Gallery of the History of Ancient Painting runs from the Knights' Hall, flanking the skylight rooms on another side. It was designed by Leo von Klenze in the Greek revival style as a prelude to the museum and features neoclassical marble sculptures by Antonio Canova and his followers. In the middle the gallery opens to the main staircase of the New Hermitage, which served as the entrance to the museum before the October Revolution of 1917, but is now closed. The upper gallery of the staircase is adorned with twenty grey Serdobol granite columns and feature 19th-century European sculpture and Russian lapidary works.

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 884