Amber room in the Catherine Palace (Pushkin)

Amber room in the Catherine Palace is extremely interesting and beautiful. It is even quite deservedly called the miracle of the world. The appearance of this unique room is covered with myths and legends. And the disappearance of this masterpiece in wartime still excites the imagination. Fortunately, the Amber Room was still recovered. In this article we will tell in detail about its history, as well as about where the Catherine Palace is located, the Amber Room. The cost of tickets and the opening hours of the museum can also be found in this article.

Prussian period

Prussian kings Electors of Brandenburg (and Prussia was considered the famous center of amber fishery in Europe) since 1618, as gifts to other princes, it became traditionally to give amber, this is the "gold" of the Baltic Sea, as it was called. Due to which the art of processing this stone developed rapidly, and one of its peaks became the Amber Room. It was created in the heyday of Prussian and German art in general, namely at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Elector Frederick III (years of government - 1657-1713) in 1701, took up the reconstruction of his capital and in particular the royal residence - a whole complex of buildings that belonged to the XVI-XVII centuries. The court architect of the King IF Eozander made countryside ownership of a real palace built on the Versailles pattern. Today it is for certain that this architect created the project of the Amber Cabinet. Litzenburg and Oranienburg, two palaces of the King of Prussia, with whom the fate of the Amber Room is associated, since 1707 became the seat of Eozander. First, the Amber Room was designed to decorate the Lietzenburg Palace. During his lifetime, the royal family could not see this room finished. The work was in 1709 still in full swing. By that time, Sofia-Charlotte had died (in 1705). Friedrich I decided to stop the project and decorate the amber panels with a gallery in his other palace - Oranienburg. Most likely, the king decided to stop construction in order to preserve the palace of Lietzenburg, the residence of his wife, the way he was during her life. The walls of the room, in which the amber panels were supposed to be installed, were decorated with gold braid and damask. And today in the palace Lietzburg you can admire the Red Damast room. In memory of the Queen Sophia-Charlotte, this palace began to be called Charlottenburg.

Then the king instructed Eozander to enlarge the palace in Oranienburg, adding there the Amber gallery 30 meters long, exceeding the size of the original design. However, despite the active work, this gallery was not finished during the life of Frederick I, who died in 1713.

Gift to Peter I

The Russian emperor was delighted with the work of Eozander and did not hide his desire to have such a work of art in his country. Friedrich Wilhelm I, heir to the king (years of life - 1688-1740, board - since 1713), introduced in his country a strict discipline, the purpose of which was practical use, and decided to stop such costly work in his father's palaces. But the unconcealed admiration of numerous guests prompted him to mount the amber panels in the study, which belongs to the ceremonial rooms of the Berlin Royal Castle. This was the only confirmed fact of the stay of this masterpiece in Berlin before being sent to the Russian capital, St. Petersburg.

Peter I during the lifetime of Frederick I personally examined the panels for the Amber Gallery during his visit to Berlin. In November 1716, during a meeting with his son, held for the sake of an alliance between Prussia and Russia, Friedrich-Wilhelm I presented the emperor with expensive gifts, among which was the Amber Cabinet. On January 13, 1717, the Amber Room was delivered to St. Petersburg in 18 boxes, in which, in addition to the finished panels, there was a large number of fragments not previously used.

Evidence of where Tsar Peter I planned to install these panels was not preserved, so the assumptions about their intended use in the interior of the Winter Palace remain groundless.

Amber Room during the reign of Elizabeth Petrovna

In 1743, the daughter of Emperor Elizabeth Petrovna, after assuming the reign, ordered to place a gift in the newly built residence - the Third Winter Palace. For the work was invited to the Italian architect A. Martelli. Under the guidance of another great architect, F. B. Rastrelli, in 1746 the transformed Amber Room appeared in the Winter Palace. However, some elements for the new interior lacked, so Rastrelli decided to install mirror pilasters and insert additional panels, painted "under the amber". In 1745, the King of Prussia Frederick II presented the Russian Empress with another amber frame, designed according to A. Reich's design, whose ornamentation used motifs and allegories that glorified the greatness of Elizabeth Petrovna. In 1746 the Amber Room was used for official receptions, although many times during the repeated reconstructions of the Winter Palace it was moved from place to place.

Amber room in the Catherine Palace

Twelve years later, in June 1755, already in Tsarskoe Selo under the decree of the Empress, the Amber Room (under the leadership of Rastrelli) begins to be created (where the Catherine Palace is located, everyone knows today). So came a new era of glory of this masterpiece in Russia, lasted about two hundred years.

The palace hall, reserved for her, was an area of 96 square meters, which significantly exceeded the size of the previous room. Therefore, the panels were placed in the middle tier on three walls and separated by pilasters with mirrors and gilt wood carvings. Where amber was lacking, the walls of the hall were covered with a canvas and decorated with a painting "under the amber", made by the artist II Velsky. Rastrelli coped brilliantly with his task, reinforcing the interior with beautiful bronze lamps, a picturesque bubble, gilded carvings, mirrors and parquet from various precious woods.

The ceiling center was decorated with a huge picture of an unknown artist from Venice of the XVIII century, depicting the Wisdom that protects Youth from the temptations of love.

The middle, central tier consisted of 8 vertical panels, of which four were mosaics made of colored stones, made in Florence in the 1750s, figuratively depicting the five main senses: Rumor, Sight, Touch, Taste and Smell.

The Amber Room of the Catherine Palace had a luxurious decoration. It was made up of Chinese porcelain and chests of Russian work. In the Amber Room, one of the largest amber collections in Europe was stored, and in due course a museum of amber things appeared where there were chess, caskets and checkers.

Personal items of royalty

From the middle of the XVIII century to Tsarskoe Selo, where by that time there were high-quality craftsmen working on amber processing, various objects belonging to the members of the royal family began to come from the Kamerzalmeister pantry for repair. The documents indicate that in 1765, more than 70 items from this stone were brought here to repair, among which were objects of worship (crucifixes and crosses), furniture (supplies, cabinets and cabinets) and household items. A special group of Elizabethan times is desk decorations made in the form of a shell shell with acanthus leaves and baroque volutes. All of them are decorated with carved images. These products, apparently, decorated the festive table of Empress Elizabeth during festive receptions.

Amber room in the time of Catherine II

In 1763, Empress Catherine II issued a decree according to which all canvases painted with "amber" should have been replaced by a real mosaic made of amber. The grandiose work took 4 years and 450 kilograms of this stone. In 1770 the works were completed.

By the decree of Catherine II, who paid much attention to the development of furniture business in Russia, the Amber Room was replenished with numerous masterpieces of this craft.

According to the inventory compiled by D. Grigorovich, by the end of the 19th century the palace had a large number of furniture, mostly dressers and tables. Basically it was of French origin. Where the place of production was not indicated, most likely it was a question of Russian products. One of the exhibits, the chest of drawers, is particularly interesting. The unusual fate of his and his twin chest of drawers is very curious. During the Great Patriotic War, they were left in the palace and taken to Germany by the invaders, and half a century later one of them returned to its original place. In the pre-war photographs of the Amber Room, both chests were fixed, they were also included in the inventory of the museum in 1938-1940. The returned item of the interior is marked, which corresponds to the numbers from the registration documents of the palace. In the 1990s, the chest of drawers was discovered in Berlin, in a private collection, and bought from its owner on the initiative of the magazine Spiegel, and later, in 2000, this masterpiece was restored to the Amber Room of the Catherine Palace (Pushkin). The chest of drawers, in addition to its interesting destiny, is curious in itself, as a model of one of the first experiences of creating furniture in Russia based on samples of French products dating back to the 1760s.

Since strong temperature drops, drafts and furnace heating destroyed amber, it was only in the 19th century that the Amber Room was restored three times.

Photo of the Amber Room

In 1907 the Lumiere brothers released the first plates-"autochromes", developing a tricolor mosaic raster. These were one of the first color images in the history of photography. In 1917, Lukomsky, head of the Art and Historical Commission, who worked in the palaces, was allowed to shoot in the palaces of Tsarskoe Selo. Including planned to remove and in the city of Pushkin Catherine Palace, the Amber Room also had to be photographed. This was a necessity for creating catalogs of museum exhibits. The shooting was conducted by A.A. Seesthem. In the Catherine Palace photos were taken in June, and in Alexandrovsky - from August 14, 1917, immediately after the last Russian emperor Nicholas II together with his family was sent to Tobolsk. PK Lukomsky October 11, 1917 received 140 photographs, one of which was captured and the Amber Room in the Catherine Palace. Until 1941, he remains the only color image of it.

In the years 1933-1935, the small works on restoration were carried out by the sculptor I. Krestovsky.

Loss of interior

In the summer of 1941, a grandiose restoration of the masterpiece was planned, but the Great Patriotic War that had begun prevented its implementation. The amber room was wanted to be evacuated, for which the mosaics were sealed with a thin layer of special tissue paper. But a trial removal of the panel showed that amber is showered. It was very important to save the Catherine Palace from looting. Amber room, the price of which was truly enormous, must certainly have been hidden from the invaders. Therefore, it was decided to put it into conservation on the spot. The panel was sealed with a gauze cloth, covered with batten covers and covered with wooden shields.

When the Amber Room (Catherine Palace, Pushkin) was attacked by German soldiers, among whom was a team of specialists in the export of artistic values, the panel was removed and sent to Koenigsberg.

Here it was until the spring of 1945. According to the German newspaper Königsberg algemeine Zeitung, art historian Alfred Rode on November 13, 1941 organized an exhibition of precious stones and some elements of Amber Room furniture (hidden in a safe place) in the Prussian Art Museum. In 1944, when the Germans retreated, the panels were dismantled, folded into boxes and sent to an unknown direction. Since then, the Amber Room has been lost.

Revival of the masterpiece

In 1979, the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR decided to recreate the amber panels.

In 1983, according to photographs and negatives, the Amber Room in the Catherine Palace began a revival on the project of architect AA Kedrinsky. In 1994, the first panels were installed in the lower tier, and two years later the work on the mosaic "Sight" was completed. In April 2000, a German commode of Russian work and a mosaic "Touch and Sense", which were part of the decoration of the room, returned to the museum.

In June 2003, in honor of the 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg, in Pushkin (Catherine Palace) the Amber Room was opened for a visit. The solemn ceremony was attended by the leaders of Russia and Germany. The work, which lasted 24 years, was completed. A new period has begun in the history of this grandiose work of art!

Amber Room (Catherine's Palace): where is, the opening hours

The city of Pushkin, in which the museum is located, is 25 kilometers from St. Petersburg.

At present, the Catherine Palace (Amber Room) is open daily from 10 to 17 hours, the only day off is Tuesday, and every last Monday of the month is a sanitary day.

In summer, the service of tourist groups and official delegations is carried out from 10 to 16 hours, and from 16 to 17 - entrance tickets for individual visitors. If there are no ordered groups, individual visitors can be serviced at other times. Tickets are not pre-sold, they need to be bought at the ticket office located in the lobby of the palace (Pushkin, Tsarskoe Selo, Catherine Palace).

Amber room, a visit which is paid, offers discounts for some categories of the population. Thus, the cost of tickets for adults is 400 rubles, and for students, students of Russian universities, as well as pensioners of the Russian Federation and Belarus - 300 rubles. These prices for tickets set the Catherine Palace. Excursion around the halls (Amber room including) is paid separately.