Hermitage trip

Wednesday was going to the Hermitage, where this expert on gold and jewels showed us around a couple exhibits where he works. He spoke very little English, so Prof Golstein had to translate. The Hermitage was beautiful—every room, not just the art. If you’re unfamiliar with the Hermitage, it’s basically Russia’s equivalent of the Louvre. It’s an enormous place. According to my guidebook the museum has 350 exhibit rooms, which would entail walking about 10k, or take 9 years to even glance at every single item. There are over 12000 sculptures, 16000 paintings, 600000 drawings and prints, 250000 works of applied art, 700000 archaeological exhibits, and a million coins and medals. Not everything is always on display of course. They have so much stuff that it spills into areas of the Hermitage you wouldn’t expect—like the internet café and internet center. I bet there are sculptures in the bathrooms too.



But on Wednesday it was just gold and jewels—from the era of the Scythians to the tsars and tsarinas. We weren’t allowed to take pictures in those exhibit rooms but I included a few random ones from our walking around.

Random picture, you can see some of my classmates to the right.


Neat things:
We got to see the oldest landscape ever rendered (on metal), it was 5 and a half thousand years old. We saw some Scythian weapons and sheaths and some beautiful Greek art that represented the Scythians and their relationship with them (where you could see the two civilizations mythologies merge in certain works).

There were some amazingly crafted small jewelry items like earrings and pendants, on which the craftsmanship is so fine and tiny that the finest jewelers today cannot even reproduce them (with better instruments and magnifying glasses and all)—and they did try. So how these people created such fine work is kind of a mystery. There was a beautiful gold necklace that was so thin and delicate that it looked like a textile.

We saw lots of roman crowns made out of thin gold. Some Byzantine art and the earliest depiction of Christ—on a small wedding ring. Lots of booty and gifts to the tsars from various countries, including this one sword and cape looking thing from Turkey that had over 16000 diamonds on it. The diamonds were enormous too, nearly the size of marbles.

There was a whole display of “small” pendants, where the craftsman used enormous jewels like pearls and emeralds and added to them to make them look like ships or people or animals (hard to explain). There was one 125k emerald made into a ship. Crazy.

Seeing the tsars’ and tsarinas’ jewels and belongings was interesting. There was Elizabeth’s 48 piece set of toiletry items (made from 100lbs of gold), some of her 1000’s of watches that went along with her 15000 dresses. People wore these gilded pocket watches that didn’t even work, but were supposed to look cool, and ladies sometimes wore on their dresses gilded manicure sets (although they would never do their nails in public). We saw Peter’s snuff box (of course in the shape of his favorite frigate—which also adorns the Admiralty). We saw the little make up boxes that were used to apply the black mole on either side of a lady’s cheek when that was popular at court. Apparently, depending on which cheek you put your mole, it meant different things, like putting a mole on the left cheek was a sign to your lover that “my husband is going to be home, so don’t come over tonight,” and on the right cheek meant “I’m free tonight, so come to my place.” Clever.

Elizabeth had this elaborate telescope she’d bring to balls with her so she could pick out the cute men. We even saw her little notebook where she’s write down who’d arrived. Elizabeth also had these ridiculous bejeweled and golden flower things she’d attach to her underclothing so when she breathed, her bosoms would move and expose the flowers, drawing more attention to that area. Ridiculous.

After the Hermitage we went out with Professor Golstein for lunch, which was tasty. Then it was studying for a test.

I liked these guys on the outside of one part of the Hermitage.