Life in colour: Saint Petersburg vacation. Hermitage Museum.

In continuation of the story about our May Saint Petersburg vacation, in this post I'm going to tell you about The State Hermitage Museum - one of the greatest Saint Petersburg places of interest, one of the largest museums in the world, a museum of art and culture, that stores more then 3 million items. The collection is displayed in few buildings. We visited only one of them - The Winter Palace - we spent 5 hours there and almost finished viewing the second floor.

The museum is really-really huge. The tourist guide says, that you need to walk 25 kilometers to see all exhibitions and if you are going to spend 1 minute viewing each item, you would need 8 years to view all of them. Hermitage stores truly great and unique art and cultural collection of different countries and epochs. And it is worth seeing. I definitely recommend visiting Hermitage.

Winter Palace is also interesting as a residence of Russian monarchs. The building itself is very interesting and richly decorated. Looking at all this luxury we can somehow imagine life of Russian emperors and have a little voyage back in time. All of the rooms are richly decorated with gold, other precious metals and stones, moldings, sculptures, paintings, precious wood, etc.
From the main entrance we get right to the Jordan Staircase constructed by famous architect Rastrelli.

Peter's (Small) Throne Room

Armonial Hall

And a lot of other halls, rooms and corridors with gorgeous decoration.

Gold Drawing Room

Boudoir

French applied art exhibition of XVII-XVIII centuries.

Exhibition of Russian culture in the second half of XVIII century.

A little bit of Chinese style.

Malachite Room

And exhibitions of different interiors of XVII century.

Russian interior of XIX century in empire style. This room was the last apartment of Russian emperor Nicholas II and his wife.

Library of Nicholas II. All furniture is made of carved walnut. This room was saved in it's initial architectural and furniture state. The shelves store real old books. Such library is probably the one from my dream. I wish I could have such in my house. :)

Throne (George) Room

The Pavilion Hall

Exhibition of Holland art of XVII century.

Here we can find quite big collection of Rembrandt's paintings. Few of his most popular paintings below: Portrait of an Old Man in the Red, Flora and Return of the Prodigal Son.

The Blue Room

Ceilings are gorgeous.

Knight's Hall

This room represents real armor and weapons and it's decoration in Western Europe in XV-XVII centuries.

The Large Italian Lumen - a room with glass ceiling and a lot of paintings of different Italian artists.

One of the rooms is dedicated to Leonardo Da Vinci. Here are his famous paintings of Madonna and Child.

Madonna and Child by Boccaccio Boccaccino and Raphael Santi.

Paintings of French artist Voille Jean Louis (XVIII century): Portrait of Olga Zherebtsova (1782), The Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna in childhood, Lady in blue (1782).