The State Hermitage Museum in located in the middle St. Petersburg, Russia along the banks of the Neva River. The Hermitage’s permanent collection is quite large, numbering at 3,000,000 works of art. The vast size of the collection has allowed for a high level of development in many aspects of the museums collections. The items in the collection represent works of art from the earliest known artifacts to present times. The director of the State Hermitage Museum is currently Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky. The Hermitage was founded in 1764 when the current Empress, Catherine the Great, obtained a large collection of Flemish and Dutch paintings from the German merchant Johann Ernest Gotzkowski. Since then, The Hermitage has amassed a large collection of which the greatest numbers of items belong to the archeological monument and numismatics categories. Due to the size of The Hermitage’s collection, the vast numbers of works of art are stored in ten separate buildings.
The permanent collections of The Hermitage are classified by the following groupings: Prehistoric Art, Antiquity, Western European Art, The Arsenal, Oriental Art, Russian Culture, Numismatics, The Treasure Gallery, The Palace of Peter J, The Menshikov Palace, The Museum of Porcelain, and The Hermitage’s Permanent Collections in the Konstantinovsky Palace. For many visitors, the most confusing of these terms, “Numismatics”, refers to coins, commemorative medals, badges and insignia, as well as other similar items.
Some of the highlights of The Hermitage’s permanent collection are great masterpieces of artwork from various times and cultures around the world. The works of art that most American and European visitors will be the most familiar with will likely be located among Western European Art. Some of the highlighted treasures of this aspect of The Hermitage’s collections are paintings by the Master’s of the Renaissance: da Vinci’s Madonna with a Flower and Madonna Litta, Raphael’s Madonna Conestabile and The Holy Family, and St. Sebastian by Titian. Along with these works, there are also German, Flemish, English, French, and Spanish paintings from many centuries from the late Middle Ages until more contemporary eras.
Like many other national art museums, The Hermitage devotes a great deal of attention to art education in the community and for its visitors. The Hermitage offers many programs for both children and adults alike to learn about
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