Step into the Winter Palace and the World's Largest Collection of Paintings
Push through the courtyard entrance off Palace Square and you are inside the Winter Palace, the former residence of the Romanov tsars and the heart of the Hermitage Museum. The scale is immediate: the museum's collections run to over three million items, and only a small part of them is on permanent display. One estimate holds that to look at each displayed exhibit for a single minute would take eleven years. That figure should shape your expectations. You cannot see the Hermitage; you can see a chosen slice of it, and the palace itself is half the reward.
The name comes from the original private apartments of the tsars — a hermitage, a refuge where the sovereign could retreat with an intimate circle of friends. Catherine the Great founded the collection in 1764 by acquiring a group of Western European paintings, and used those apartments to host private salons. The museum has been open to the public since 1852. Today the main complex occupies six historic buildings along Palace Embankment, five of them open to visitors: the Winter Palace, the Small Hermitage, the Old Hermitage, the New Hermitage, and the Hermitage Theatre.
Walk the State Rooms and the Great Collections
Start with the building. Wandering the enormous palace is rewarding whether or not you care about art, and the State Rooms and main European masterpieces alone justify at least three hours of self-guided walking. Then choose your ground and go deep:
- Italian Renaissance: the first floor of the Old Hermitage holds works by Giorgione, Titian, and Veronese, alongside the Benois Madonna and Madonna Litta attributed to Leonardo da Vinci or his school. The galleries continue in the eastern wing of the New Hermitage with Raphael's Conestabile Madonna and Madonna with Beardless St. Joseph.
- Italian and Spanish fine art: three large red-walled rooms in the centre of the New Hermitage, lit from above by skylights, hang canvases of the 16th to 18th centuries by Veronese, Tintoretto, Velázquez, and Murillo.
- Classical antiquities: most of the ground floor of the Old and New Hermitage, in interiors designed by Leo von Klenze in the Greek Revival style with columns of natural marble and granite. Look for the Tauride Venus, now considered an original Hellenistic Greek sculpture rather than a Roman copy, and the Gonzaga Cameo.
- The Room of the Great Vase: in the western wing of the New Hermitage, the Kolyvan Vase of jasper was installed before the walls were erected around it.
- Egyptian antiquities: a large hall on the ground floor of the eastern Winter Palace, occupied since 1940.
- Prehistoric art and the Caucasus: ground floor, western wing of the Winter Palace, including the Pazyryk finds from the Altai — among them the world's oldest surviving knotted-pile carpet and a well-preserved wooden chariot.
- The treasure galleries: four small rooms enclosed in the middle of the New Hermitage hold western jewellery from the 4th millennium BC to the early 20th century; a second gallery in the southwest corner of the Winter Palace shows Scythian and Sarmatian gold.
- Knights' Hall: Western European arms and armour of the 15th to 17th centuries, with the adjoining Gallery of the History of Ancient Painting and its neoclassical marble sculpture by Antonio Canova and his followers.
Do not leave without the Pavilion Hall, designed by Andrei Stackenschneider in 1858 on the first floor of the Northern Pavilion of the Small Hermitage. It holds the 18th-century golden Peacock Clock by James Cox and a collection of mosaics.
Time Your Visit and Pace Yourself
Go in the morning if you want the palace before the day's crowds thicken, or take advantage of the late evenings on Wednesday and Friday, when the museum stays open well past its usual closing. The museum is closed on Mondays. Entrance for individual visitors is through the Winter Palace, from the courtyard; buying tickets online spares you the ticket-office queue. Admission is free for all visitors on one Thursday each month, and free daily for students and children — days that draw correspondingly large crowds. Foreign visitors pay more than citizens of Russia and Belarus.
Allow at least three hours for a first pass through the State Rooms and the main European paintings, and accept that the branches are separate trips. Across Palace Square, the crescent-shaped General Staff Building is the permanent home of the Impressionist and post-Impressionist collection, with Van Gogh and Matisse. Beneath the stage of the Hermitage Theatre, archaeologists in the 1980s unearthed the original Winter Palace of Peter the Great, whose restored rooms you can visit. The Menshikov Palace, one of the city's oldest buildings, displays early 18th-century applied art. In northern Saint Petersburg, the Staraya Derevnya Restoration and Storage Centre opens the undisplayed collections through guided tours. Photography is permitted without flash; audio-guides are available, and the museum is wheelchair accessible with ramps and lifts — call ahead, as staff assistance may be required.
What Lies Beyond the Palace Doors
You are standing in the historic centre of Saint Petersburg, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and the density of what surrounds you is the reason to build a day around the Hermitage rather than slot it in. Palace Square gives onto the Admiralty and the Bronze Horseman. A short walk brings you to the Church on the Spilled Blood, filled with mosaics and set on the Griboedov Canal near the Mikhailovsky Garden. Nevsky Prospekt, the city's grand avenue, leads past Gostiny Dvor and the Kazan Cathedral; off it lie the Square of the Arts and the Russian Museum. Saint Isaac's Cathedral and its balcony views, and the Mariinsky Theatre, one of the world's most beautiful performance venues, are both within the same neighbourhood. Stroll the palace-lined banks of the Moika, the Fontanka, and the Griboedov Canal, or in summer see the architecture from the water on a channel tour or a riverbus along the Neva.
Begin with a single decision: which three hours of the Hermitage are yours. Choose your rooms — the Leonardo and Raphael galleries, the treasure rooms, the Peacock Clock — buy your ticket online, and let the rest of the palace wait for the next visit, as it has waited for everyone.