The Exhibits

The permanent exhibition consists of six different departments. By far the most popular is the Department of Western European Art. Spread over the second floor of the whole complex and the third floor of the Winter Palace, it includes painting, sculpture, and applied art from the Middle Ages to modern times.

French art prior to the 19th century is located at the southern end of the second floor of the Winter Palace in some of the nicest rooms of the whole museum, with the White Hall (Bely zal) outstanding in its grandeur. Among the paintings are some excellent sculptures, particularly Houdon's Voltaire (room 287) and several works by Falconet (who also did the Bronze Horseman), including two vivid statues of a guy getting chomped by a lion (room 285). The English art collection, located in rooms 298-302, is small and often closed.

Wandering over to the Old and New Hermitage buildings, you'll find room after room of Dutch, Italian, Flemish, German, and Spanish* art. The biggest crowd-puller is room 254, where twenty-odd Rembrandts are hung. Also extra-notable are room 247, where lovers of roundy Rubens' nudes will find their calling; room 246, packed full of Van Dyck; the sculpture-filled Gallery of Ancient Painting (room 251); room 229, filled with Italian porcelain from the 15th and 16th centuries as well as the Michelangelo statue, Crouching Boy, and the centerpiece, Dead Boy on a Dolphin by Lorenzo Lorenzetti; the ornate room 214 (formerly Nicholas I's office) where the museum's two Leonardo's are displayed; and a couple rooms of Titian (219 and 221).

The third floor is home to Western European art of the 19th and 20th centuries, a very impressive collection of leading names of the early modern period - Monet, Degas, Renoir, Gaugain, Van Gogh, Cezanne and others of that crowd. If everything is here (paintings from this exhibition occasionally go abroad on holiday) you can treat yourself to two rooms of Picassos * and the very large Matisse collection, which includes two paintings from his famous Dance series. Don't miss the somewhat hidden rooom 315 which is filled with the fantastic sculpture of Auguste Rodin.

The bulk of the Russian Culture exhibition is accessible from a corridor - the Peter I Gallery - that runs parallel to the State Rooms. In this corridor and in the room that opens off it you can find items representing Russian life and culture from the 15th to the early 18th century including tools, icons, books, and a 1698 cloth map of Siberia. Just off the Malachite Hall is the White Dining Room, a small room lined with tapestries showing silly depictions of the continents; for those visitors not acquainted with the Marxist-Leninist approach to Winter Palace appreciation, signs here and in the Malachite Hall inform us that the White Dining Room was where the members of the provisional government were arrested during the October Revolution. From the Malachite Hall you can cruise through thirteen rooms showing examples of Russian interior design complete with an 18th century studio apartment (office, living room, and boudoir in one), an Eastern-style smoking room, a "moderne" children's room, and many more. On your way to the French art be sure not to miss two of the most outrageous rooms in the entire place: room 306, which can only be described as the inspiration for late perestroika-era joint-venture restaurants, and room 304, a garish, gilt-ridden palatial room which holds a large exhibition of carved precious gems (Catherine the Great collected over ten thousand of them) dating from the 13th century.

The first floor holds an exhibition called Art and Culture of Antiquity as well as the Department of Primitive Culture. The former features a large assortment of artifacts from Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, and the latter is an interesting display of items found on archeological digs throughout Russia and the former Soviet Union. The Egypt room, right smack in the center of the whole complex, is filled with reliefs, statues, huge sarcophagae and little ancient knick-knacks, but the three thousand-year-old mummy definitely steals the show. The Greece and Rome rooms are worth seeing not only for the amazing collections of ceramics, sculptures, and narrative reliefs, but also for the rooms themselves, all located on the first floor of the New Hermitage. Of special note is room 107, with a 3.5 meter Jupiter and several classic busts; room 108, designed to resemble the inner courtyard of a Roman villa; room 128, which has the Kolyvan Vase, a nineteen-ton jasper monster that is 2.6 meters tall and took fourteen years to carve; and room 120, the Hall of 20 Columns, filled with Etruscan amphorae, pitchers, and other receptacles for the juice of Bacchus.

Finding the Primitive Culture exhibition can be difficult as most of the staircases to the first floor are closed. Currently the staircase just off the end of the Peter I Gallery gets you there. This is always the least crowded exhibition, though that's not to say that there's nothing of interest. The exhibition begins with Russia's answer to the Egyptian mummy (room 24). The items displayed date back to the Paleolithic, which was 500,000 years ago last Tuesday. Room 12 has a slab taken from a cliff near Lake Onega with some petroglyphs that have yet to be deciphered - anyone deciphering them will get fifty percent off their next admission to the Hermitage. There are several rooms featuring artifacts from the Scythian epoch (700-200 B.C.) mostly taken from burial mounds discovered around the Black Sea/Caucases area. The Scythians, like the Egyptians, took burials quite seriously and the more weight a person pulled in society, the more stuff got stuck into the ground with him when he died; tribal chiefs would make their journey to the next world laden down with snacks, weapons, utensils, expensive jewelry, horses, servants, and wives.

The collection known as Art and Culture of the East suffers more than any other from temporary closures. The section of the exhibition that is located on the first floor has been closed for a while, and the supervisors of the third floor part are the first to get moved to other places requiring more supervision - the staff cafeteria, for instance - thus rendering certain rooms unreachable. Chances are you will be able to see some of the China exhibit (rooms 351-357 and 359), Indonesia (358), and a couple Byzantium rooms (381-382). Also on the third floor are exhibitions featuring the Near and Middle East, with a large display of Persian silver from the 3rd to 7th centuries, Egyptian fabrics from the 7th to 15th centuries, and tons of Turkish applied art; a relatively modern exhibit of Indian art and weapons from the 17th to 20th centuries; two thousand years of Mongolian relics; and a collection of Japanese decorative and applied art.

People into numismatics will find many items of interest spread about the Hermitage. In addition to the coins and seals that are part of various other departments, large collections of Russian and European coins, medals, and decorations are displayed in the Raphael Loggia, in the foyer of the Hermitage Theater, and in a hall on the third floor accessible from the staircase at the end of the Peter I Gallery.