May 26 – Saint Petersburg, Russia. Lake Lagoda is big enough that it can become very rough but usually only in early spring or late fall. After crossing the lake we will enter the Neva River which flows through Saint Petersburg. Our dock will be about 45 minutes from central St. Petersburg. In Russia as in SoCal, you don't day distance in miles or kilometers, you use time. Traffic is not as bad here as it is in Moscow, but it's still terrible on some streets especially during commuting hours.
Our dock is right after you go under a very new suspension bridge of what I call the harp design. The suspension wires fan out from the bridge towers like the strings of a harp rather than vertically down from a main cable between the towers. It's a very aesthetically pleasing design and has a very modern look. They have them all over the world now.
Today is going to be a long day. First we booked an extensive tour of the Hermitage Museum that also includes a visit to the Storage. The museum is like the Smithsonian in DC or the Getty in LA, only has exhibition space for a small percentage of its artifacts. Many of the exhibits not on display are in the Storage, a very secure facility in the St. Petersburg suburbs. This facility is only open to visitors by private arrangement and Viking has procured some of that space for their passengers. It's the only optional tour you could sign up for before getting on the ship. In fact, they recommended that you do as often there's no space available to book after boarding. That's the case on this cruise. If it wasn't booked from home, it's not available. Next we have a ballet to go to this evening. We're going to see Swan Lake at the St. Petersburg Conservatory of Dance. The Hermitage and Storage is from 8:45AM to 5PM and the ballet is from 6:45PM to 11:15PM. That's a long tour day.
Like the Smithsonian, the Hermitage is located in several buildings three of which are on the street that runs along the southern bank of the Neva River and the fourth is behind one of the three. The Winter Palace, Small Hermitage, Old Hermitage and New Hermitage are now connected with cross overs and are essentially one huge building from the inside. The façades have maintained their separate identity on the outside by using different colors of paint. The Winter Palace, easily the largest of the four is aqua, The Small Hermitage is green. The Old Hermitage is Yellow. The New Hermitage is behind the Old Hermitage and since I never saw it from the outside, I don't know what color it is.
The entrance to the museum is in the Winter Palace the main residence of the Russian Tsars. It's a main staircase designed for one purpose, to impress the visitor. Whether in the Tsar's times or now it does not fail to do just that. It's dual grand staircase leading up to the second floor, which only occupies half of the room is grand indeed. It's a masterpiece of white marble and gold for the first story and a half topped off with a perspective architectural painting with a huge picture at the center. The walls curve inward at the top toward the center of the room and the perspective painting makes it look like they rise vertically again for about 5 feet and terminate with the huge painting. In fact, the perspective painting and the large central picture are on a flat surface. It just looks like the ceiling rises an additional five feet.
The painting is of the Last Judgment, Gabriel is blowing his horn and some people are going up and others are going down. It's probably not all that surprising that Mary, Queen of Heaven looks a lot like Catherine the Great. Catherine founded the Hermitage collection in 1764 making the museum one of the world's oldest as well as one of the world's largest. She had the Small Hermitage built to house it but it soon outgrew that building and the Old Hermitage was built in 1787. The museum now owns over 3,000,000 items the majority of which the public has never seen.
The highlight of the museum for me was seeing another Caravaggio, The Lute Player c1596. Caravaggio painted a lute player three times making the year it was produced important. Two of them have flowers to the left of the painting, the one here in the Hermitage and one in Badminton, England. The one in England is disputed and I personally believe it is not an original but a copy. The provenance of the one in the Hermitage is undisputed. When we were in New York I mentioned seeing the other The Lute Player at the Met in New York City. The compositions are much the same but the Met version has no flowers, there's a musical instrument that looks a lot like a zither in their place. I can really go on and on about Caravaggio, I am unabashedly a fan. However I'm not sure I would have like to know him, he was a bit of a rascal, which ended up getting him killed.
Of course the Winter Palace rooms are all uniquely decorated and amazing. This part of the museum is preserved as a reminder of how the Tsars lived when in Saint Petersburg. The Portrait Gallery, is almost entirely wallpapered in original oil portraits separated only by red cloth and gilded frames. The Throne Room is huge, again white marble and gold with an intricate parquet floor and 6 huge golden chandeliers each with well over 100 candles. Many of the rooms are known by the color of the pilasters, red, blue, green, gold, etc. Each is opulently decorated and has elegant, if not overdone, furnishings. These were the private rooms of the Tsar and the royal family as well as the state rooms used for ceremonies and rituals.
At one point we had to interrupt our trip through the Winter Palace to make out appointed appearance to the Gold Rooms. The Gold Rooms are a vault where very old and valuable treasures are kept. Unfortunately they do not allow pictures inside the vault. It holds some of the oldest artifacts in the entire collection. One of my favorites was a Comb with a Scythians in Battle carved into it from the 5th century BC. I was very pleased to see that the Hermitage has not yet gotten around to the new and politically correct term BCE (Before the Common Era) rather than BC (Before Christ). Another was a kolt, temple ornament, from an ancient village in Volograd Russia. It's made of gold and has garnets set in it.
Once we crossed over the passage to the Small Hermitage the rooms were much more museum like with little furniture, not so elegantly decorated and lots more art. They have some great impressionist paintings by Renoir (In the Garden c1885, Woman on a Stair c1876, Child with a Whip c1885), Van Gogh (Thatched Cottages c1890, Landscape with House and Ploughman c1889) and Monet (An early one The Grand Quay at Havre). They have a few paintings by Cézanne, Pissarro, Boudin and Seurat but they are not their best work. Most of them seem to have been painted before they hit their stride. Although Boulevard Montmartre, Sunny Afternoon c1897 is very good. They had a few by Gauguin, but I have to be honest, I've never cared for him much even at his best.
They also have a good collection of the Old Masters, El Greco, Valazquez, Rembrandt, Da Vinci (Madonna And Child), Titian and Raffaello (The Madonna and Child c1520).
At about 1PM we left the Hermitage to go to the Storage Facility at Staraya Derevnya. The guides just call it Storage. This is the attic of the Hermitage. The first order of business was lunch. They served us a small cabbage salad, borsht and veal stroganoff all accompanied by some very good Russian dark bread. Yummy!!
It's not only a facility for storing thing, although it certainly is that. Things that are very valuable or in need of cleaning, preservation or restoration are also brought here. In this case preservation is used as a term of art. When faced with an artifact that is damaged the institution has three choices, leave it alone, clean it, preserve it or restore it. Various curators and experts have differing opinions but each is a viable choice in certain circumstances.
For example, let's say a museum has a pair of long-johns worn by a famous person of history and wants to display it. They are woolen so over time they have become damaged, moths, tears, etc. Wool being organic is subject to all sorts of problems that will damage it further so leaving it alone is probably not a good idea. Some experts feel that restoration destroys the historic value of an artifact because you no longer have the real object, things have been added, repairs to rips, reweaving moth holes, etc. If you only clean them they are still subject to more damage. Preservation would be a good answer for these long-johns. What they'd do is permeate the wool with agents to prevent further damage while leaving the holes and tears along. If done correctly it won't change the look of the article either.
Storage is the place where the Hermitage makes and then carries out the plan for each article in their inventory. Many things are restored as they make a much better display. Paintings and the like are often cleaned and many are also restored because previous ill-advised 'restorations or cleanings' have in fact damaged them more. To correct these mistakes a modern restoration is undertaken. I just hope that some future curator doesn't view this modern process as a big mistake.
No pictures allowed inside the buildings. We have a very small group, about 16. We are accompanied by our guide, a Storage guide and bringing up the rear a rather large security officer. The Storage guide unlocks the doors to each room with her electronic key, we all enter and the guard closes the door behind us and generally hovers around at the rear of the group.
They have those shelves and racks on rollers. You spin a handle on the end of the rack to move it aside to allow you to enter the row you want. If your target is in the middle and the open row is at one end you have to roll each set of shelves aside to get to the next one and so on until you get to where you need to be. It's a great system as you double your useable space by eliminating all but one aisle and you just have to move the shelves to get that aisle between the shelves you need to use. It's useful in the painting and print section as you can get 10 times the storage because the eliminated aisles are much wider than the stands the paintings hang from.
Other rooms are more traditional storage with furniture and large decorational objects stored separately in rows. One difference is that they've built risers to make each row higher that the ones right by the aisles so you can more easily see what's in the more distant rows.
Everything here is climate controlled and the Hermitage proper is not. Often they will bring objects to Storage to get them into an environment that will allow them to dry out or remoisturize as the case may be. The Hermitage is heated and that probably takes a toll on wooden objects over the long Russian winter.
When Saint Petersburg was threatened by the Germans in WWII, many valuable artifacts were packed up and sent out of town to be hidden. They couldn't take all the furniture or china and things like that so they packed up one of each thing to use as a model for recreation if needed. Based on the photos I've seen of how the Germans left the building of these palaces. Really bad.
The last room was full of carriages, sleighs and other conveyances. The grand masterpiece, Catherine the Great's carriage was the absolute definition of a royal vehicle. They don't get any grander than that.
Last time I was here I didn't see the Gold Rooms or the Storage both very worthwile additions.
We had to get back to the ship for dinner because we are going to the ballet this evening. We're seeing Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky c1876. I've seen this ballet before so I know the story and the music a bit. My favorite melding of music and dance is in it. It's the Dance of the Little Swans where 4 ballerinas hold hands with each other across their bodies and dance the entire piece that way. If you want to see it follow this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCQd1L_j-6A
The Big Swan's Dance that follows it is not bad either but the combination of music and dance steps of the Little Swans is my favorite
We saw the production at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory of Dance and it was very enjoyable. I don't know enough about ballet to form an opinion about the technical merit of the dancers but the best dancer for me was the Joker. He's one of those performers that will never get a leading part because he's not tall enough and he's too stocky to provide the elegant line needed with a ballerina but he's a powerful and graceful dancer so he'll get a lot of 'character' parts. Everyone else seemed to enjoy it as well.
Got back to the ship at Midnight and we have an early tour tomorrow so it was quickly to bed.
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