Highlights from the palatial Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, are beautifully reproduced in an accessible volume celebrating the museum's 250th anniversary. For 250 years, the State Hermitage Museum has been one of the world's most palatial and significant museums. The Hermitage collections were developed beginning in 1764 by Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, and now encompass more than 3 million works of art and artifacts displayed within a spectacular architectural ensemble, the heart of which is the famed Winter Palace. Now, on this important anniversary, this stunning volume captures the masterpieces that make this world-famous institution a cultural destination and a global treasure.
"The Hermitage: 250 Masterpieces" explores this sumptuous collection in the manner of a private tour, showcasing the museum's extraordinary and uniquely underpublished treasures: no other institution has thirty-six Rembrandts; works by Italian Renaissance artists including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Titian; Spanish artists such as Vel+zquez, Ribera, and Murillo; Flemish baroque artists such as van Dyck, Rubens, and Jan Brueghel the Elder; impressionist and post-impressionist works by Renoir, Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, and Degas; and modern paintings by Matisse, Picasso, Malevich, and Kandinsky. Priceless antiquities, feats of mechanical engineering such as the famous Peacock Clock, and works of sculpture and decorative arts will also be shown. With lavish reproductions accompanied by texts by the museum's leading curators, this volume is sure be cherished by art lovers around the world.

Prerevolutionary Russia was renowned for the glam- orous and luxurious lifestyles of the nobility, with their opulent palaces and glittering social life. Now, this lavish volume reveals the incredible clothing they wore, from everyday dress and ceremonial attire (traditional holidays outfits and military uniforms) to dress for special occasions, including elaborate evening wear for theater and musical events and fancy masquerade balls. Celebrated for luxurious materials and impeccable craftsmanship, the dress of the Russian nobility was haute couture at its finest. With beautiful photog- raphy and details highlighting the hand-spun silks and lace and jeweled embroideries, Russian Splendor highlights the glamour of this gilded age and offers a fascinating window into a vanished world. Essays by Hermitage Museum curators, alongside historic Russian paintings and photographs, place the clothing in a historical context, revealing the rich cultural layers and artistic influences of czarist Russia.

The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg has survived through 250 years of tsars, assassinations, fires, revolutions, and two world wars to become a global cultural destination housing one of the largest collections of art in the world. In an extraordinary memoir, the museum's longtime director takes the reader on a private tour of this global treasure. Holding one of the largest collections of Western and Oriental art in the world, the Hermitage is also a product of Russia and its dramatic history. Founded by Empress Catherine the Great in 1764, the stunning Winter Palace was built to house her growing collection of Old Masters and to serve as a home for the imperial family. Tsars came and went over the years, bloodily or peacefully, artworks were acquired and sold, buildings were burned down in terrible fires, and still the collections grew. After the violent upheavals of the Russian Revolution in 1917, the palaces and collections were opened to the public, ultimately enduring even the three-year siege of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) by the Nazis in World War II. Now, in an unprecedented collection of illuminating essays, Piotrovsky explores the cultural history of a collection as rich in adventure as art. From fascinating intrigues, such as the Impressionist masterpieces recovered in Germany after World War II and hidden from the public for fifty years, to revelatory scholarship on the collection's incredible art and artifacts, these authoritative and engaging anecdotes make for an exceptional read. My Hermitage is a profound and captivating story of art's timelessness and how it brings people together.