The Hermitage is one of the most popular museums in our country, its image is firmly connected in our minds with the elegant rooms of the Winter Palace. Indeed, the Winter Palace is the main and largest building of the museum, its visiting card. But the Winter Palace began to be converted into exhibition premises only in the 20th century. The Hermitage as a museum did not start from here.
The first museum building in the architectural ensemble of the Winter Palace can be considered the Small Hermitage, architects Felten and Wallen-Delamot. This building consists of two pavilions - north and south, and two galleries located on the sides of the Hanging Garden. The galleries were built last, but they were the ones dedicated to exhibiting art objects. Pictures in the galleries were placed by continuous, "tapestry" hanging.
Given the purpose, the walls of the galleries are very restrained. The main decorative load falls on the canvas, it is decorated with various stucco moldings and, in order to avoid monotony, due to its long length, small false domes and cylindrical vaults are made here. Below the domes, in medallions made of floral ornamentation, there are relief profile portraits of famous Western European and Russian artists, sculptors, scientists and architects - Titian, Rubens, Ghiberti, Martos, Murillo and others. Such, in the opinion of their creators, should have been the museum interiors of the late classicism era.
The second building designed for storing objects of art was the Great Hermitage, later called the Old. Initially, it consisted of two buildings - a building in line with the Small Hermitage along the Palace Embankment and the Loggia Raphael building, built a little later, perpendicular to the previous building, along the Winter Canal. In the Great Hermitage of the architect Felten there was a library of Russian literature, some of the rooms were reserved for living quarters.
In the building of the Loggias of Raphael by the architect Quarenghi, not only copies of the Vatican paintings were located. The hall with windows to the courtyard, the North and South offices at its ends were intended for storing art collections. Their design was simple enough. In the central hall above the windows there were medallions with reliefs, and niches with coffered hemispherical ceilings were arranged at the ends. On the first floor, the layout of which almost exactly corresponded to the upper one, over time a library of foreign literature was built. The building of Raphael's Loggias is completely lost, only the wall from the side of the canal remains. A room with copies of the Vatican murals is built into the building of the New Hermitage.
After the opening of the New Hermitage, the palace collection moved there. In the middle of the 19th century, in the former exhibition premises of the Old Hermitage, the architect Stackenschneider arranged living rooms, offices and ceremonial halls. The first floor was occupied by government agencies for some time.
At present, the second floor is again reserved for exhibition halls. The layout of two longitudinal enfilades has been preserved here - one overlooks the embankment, the second into the courtyard, and the decoration intended by Stackenschneider for the living quarters. The halls with windows overlooking the Neva - the Front Suite - are especially elegantly decorated. It is opened by the former Front Reception Room with jasper columns, picturesque pilasters, colored wood doors with painted porcelain medallions, gilded stucco moldings and painted panels on the ceiling and above the doors. The decoration of the largest and most elegant two-story hall in the Old Hermitage is striking in the variety of decorative elements and materials used. Here is jasper and marble, porphyry and lapis lazuli. The second room is octahedral in plan, covered with a dome. Here, as in the following rooms, the main decorative load falls on the ceiling, richly decorated with gilded stucco molding and relief dessudeports with pictorial inserts.
The halls of the New Hermitage already have a specific museum character. For the design, the German architect Leo von Klenze was involved, who already had experience in building a public museum - the Munich Pinakothek. N. Efimov supervised the construction and finishing of the building.
According to Klenze's idea, sculptures of Ancient and Modern times, as well as antique art, were to be exhibited on the ground floor. Therefore, some of the rooms are decorated in an antique style. One of them, the Twenty-Column, was intended for Greek and Etruscan vases. It is built like an ancient basilica. The ceiling is covered with murals in the spirit of antique ceramics painting, and on the walls there are compositions in the Greek style. The floor is paved with mosaics with acanthus ornaments and meander. Another hall of Ancient Sculpture is designed in the form of an antique courtyard. It is decorated with white fluted Corinthian columns, the walls are lined with artificial marble in dark lilac color, and the tiled floor is decorated with geometric and floral designs.
The hall in which the architect intended to exhibit the sculpture of the modern era is supplemented by medallions with profiles of Michelangelo, Canova, Martos and others. Portraits of prominent sculptors are placed on the ceiling, which in this room bears the main decorative load. The vault is covered with a box vault with stripping and abundantly covered with stucco decoration. The walls are covered with deep green artificial marble.
In the rest of the rooms on the ground floor, the walls are also faced with colored artificial marble, and the ceilings are either with stripping, painted with a floral pattern in the antique spirit, or straight, decorated with ornamented caissons.
The second floor opens with a gallery of the History of Ancient Painting. The gallery consists of four square rooms, each of which is covered with a dome. The sails supporting the domes carry bas-relief portraits of prominent artists, including Leo von Klenze himself. To decorate the gallery, paintings were painted that tell the story of painting.
The most solemn premises on the second floor are a suite of three halls with overhead lighting. Giant closed vaults with gaps are completely covered with arabesque stucco. The halls are intended for large-format works. The tent hall is notable for the fact that in its gable ceiling you can see the entire rafter system covered with paintings.
A special feature of the New Hermitage is that this building was conceived and embodied precisely for exhibiting art objects. The middle of the 19th century in the architecture of Russia is the time of turning to various architectural styles of the past. Designing the halls intended for the museum, trying to create consonance between the objects on display and the interior, Leo von Klenze had the happy opportunity to use elements of Greek, Roman and Renaissance architecture.
