Extraordinarily interesting and beautiful is the Amber Room in the Catherine Palace. She is even quite deservedly called a wonder of the world. The appearance of this unique building is fanned with myths and legends. And the disappearance of this masterpiece in wartime still excites the imagination. Fortunately, the Amber Room was still able to be restored. In this article we will tell in detail about its history, as well as about where the Catherine Palace and the Amber Room are located. Ticket prices and museum opening hours can also be found in this article.
Prussian period
Prussian kings Electors of Brandenburg (and Prussia was considered the famous center of amber craft in Europe) since 1618, amber was traditionally given as gifts to other princes, this is the "gold" of the Baltic Sea, as it was called. Thanks to this, the art of processing this stone rapidly developed, and the Amber Room became one of its peaks. It was created during the heyday of Prussian and German art as a whole, namely at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Elector Frederick III (reign of 1657-1713) in 1701 took up the reconstruction of his capital and, in particular, the royal residence - a whole complex of buildings dating back to the 16th-17th centuries. The court architect of the king, I.F. Eosander, made the suburban ownership of a real palace built on the Versailles model. Nowadays it is known for certain that this architect created the project of the Amber Cabinet. Litzenburg and Oranienburg, the two palaces of the King of Prussia, with which the fate of the Amber Room is associated, became the place of activity of Eosander in 1707. At first, the Amber Room was designed to decorate the Litzenburg Palace. During life, 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). Frederick I decided to halt the implementation of the project and decorate the gallery with amber in his other palace - Oranienburg. Most likely, the king decided to stop construction in order to preserve the Litzenburg Palace, the residence of his wife, as he was during her lifetime. The walls of the hall, in which the amber panels were supposed to be installed, were decorated with gold galloon and damask. And today in the Litzenburg Palace you can admire the Red Damask Room. In memory of Queen Sophia-Charlotte, this palace became known as Charlottenburg.
Then the king instructed Eosander to enlarge the palace in Oranienburg, adding there the Amber Gallery 30 meters long, which exceeded the size of the original project. However, despite active work, this gallery was not completed during the lifetime of Frederick I, who died in 1713.
Gift to Peter I
The Russian emperor was delighted with the work of Eosander and did not hide his desire to have such a work of art in his country. Friedrich-Wilhelm I, the heir to the king (years of life - 1688-1740, reign - from 1713), introduced strict discipline in his country, the purpose of which was of practical use, and decided to stop such expensive work in the palaces of his father. But the undisguised admiration of many guests prompted him to mount the amber panels into the office belonging to the ceremonial chambers of the Berlin Royal Castle. This was the only confirmed fact that this masterpiece was in Berlin before being sent to the Russian capital, St. Petersburg.
During the life of Frederick I, Peter I personally inspected the panels for the Amber Gallery during his visit to Berlin. In November 1716, during a meeting with his son, held in order to conclude an alliance between Prussia and Russia, Frederick William I presented the emperor with expensive gifts, including 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 were a large number of fragments not previously used.
Evidence of where Tsar Peter I planned to install these panels has not been preserved, so the assumptions about their intended use in the interior of the Winter Palace remain unfounded.
Amber Room during the reign of Elizabeth Petrovna
In 1743, the daughter of the emperor Elizabeth Petrovna, after entering the kingdom, ordered a gift to be placed in a new residence under construction - the Third Winter Palace. The Italian architect A. Martelli was invited to carry out the work. Under the direction of another great architect - F. B. Rastrelli - already in 1746, the transformed Amber Cabinet appeared in the Winter Palace. However, some elements for the new interior were lacking, so Rastrelli decided to install mirrored pilasters and insert additional panels painted "under amber". In 1745, King of Prussia Frederick II presented the Russian Empress with another amber frame designed by A. Reich, which was decorated with motifs and allegories that glorified the greatness of Elizabeth Petrovna. In 1746, the Amber Room began to be used for official receptions, although it was many times transferred from place to place during repeated reconstructions of the Winter Palace.
Amber Room in the Catherine Palace
After 12 years, in June 1755, already in Tsarskoye Selo, by decree of the empress, the Amber Room begins to be created under the direction of Rastrelli (everyone knows today where the Catherine Palace is located). So a new era of glory of this masterpiece in Russia began, lasting about two hundred years.
The palace hall reserved for her was 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 gilded wood carvings. Where amber was lacking, the walls of the hall were covered with canvas and decorated with "amber" painting by artist I. I. Velsky. Rastrelli brilliantly accomplished his task, reinforcing the interior with beautiful bronze lamps, a picturesque ceiling, gilded carvings, mirrors and parquet from various precious woods.
The center of the ceiling was decorated with a huge-sized painting by an unknown artist from Venice of the 18th century, depicting Wisdom protecting the Youth from the temptations of love.
The middle and 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 basic senses: Hearing, Vision, Touch, Taste and Smell.
The amber office of the Catherine Palace had luxurious decoration. It was made up of Chinese porcelain and dressers of Russian work. The Amber Room also housed one of the largest collections of amber products in Europe, and over time, a museum of amber things appeared, where there were chess, caskets and checkers.
Personal items of royal family members
From the middle of the 18th century, Tsarskoye Selo, where by that time high-class amber processing craftsmen had appeared, various items belonging to members of the royal family began to arrive from the Chamber of the Chamber for repair, The documents indicate that in 1765 more than 70 products from this stone were brought here to be repaired, among which were objects of worship (crucifixes and crosses), furniture (suppliers, cabinets and cabinets) and household items. A special group of things of the time of Elizabeth are table decorations made in the form of a shell leaf with acanthus leaves and a baroque volute. All are decorated with carvings. These products, apparently, adorned the festive table of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna during ceremonial receptions.
Amber Room during the time of Catherine II
In 1763, Empress Catherine II issued a decree according to which all canvases painted “under amber” should be replaced with real amber mosaics. The grandiose work took 4 years and 450 kilograms of this stone. In 1770, the work was completed.
By decree of Catherine II, who paid great attention to the development of furniture 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 there was a large amount of furniture in the palace, mainly chests of drawers and tables. Mostly she was of French descent. Where the place of manufacture was not indicated, most likely it was a question of Russian products. One of the exhibits, a chest of drawers, is especially interesting. The unusual fate of him and his dresser paired with him is very curious. During the Great Patriotic War, they were left in the palace and taken to Germany by the invaders, and after half a century one of them returned to its original place. Both chests of drawers were recorded in pre-war photographs of the Amber Room, and they were also included in the inventory of the museum in 1938-1940. The returned interior item has a marking that corresponds to the numbers from the accounting documents of the palace. In the 1990s, a chest of drawers was discovered in Berlin, in a private collection, and purchased from its owner at the initiative of the magazine "Spiegel", and later, already in 2000, this masterpiece was restored to the Amber Room of the Catherine Palace (Pushkin). The chest of drawers, in addition to its interesting fate, is curious in itself, as an example of one of the first experiments in creating furniture in Russia based on samples of French products dating back to the 1760s.
Since strong temperature changes, drafts and furnace heating destroyed amber, only in the XIX century the Amber Room was restored three times.
Amber Room Snapshot
In 1907, the Lumiere brothers released their first autochrome records, developing a three-color mosaic raster. These were one of the first color images in the history of photography. In 1917, Lukomsky, the head of the Art-Historical Commission, which worked in the palaces, received permission to take pictures in the palaces of Tsarskoye Selo. In particular, it was planned to remove the Catherine Palace in Pushkin, the Amber Room also had to be photographed. This was a necessity for creating catalogs of museum exhibits. The shooting was carried out by A.A. Seestom. Photos were taken in the Catherine Palace in June, and in the Alexander Palace on August 14, 1917, immediately after the last Russian Emperor Nicholas II and his family were sent to Tobolsk. P.K.Lukomsky October 11, 1917 received 140 photographs, one of which was captured and the Amber Room in the Catherine Palace. Until 1941, he remained her only color image.
In 1933-1935 minor restoration work was carried out by sculptor I. Krestovsky.
Loss of interior
In the summer of 1941, a grand restoration of the masterpiece was planned, but the outbreak of World War II prevented its implementation. They wanted to evacuate the amber room, 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 crumbling. It was very important to preserve the Catherine Palace from plunder. The amber room, the price of which was truly enormous, certainly had to be hidden from the invaders. Therefore, it was decided to preserve it on the spot. The panels were glued with gauze, covered with batting covers and covered with wooden shields.
When the Amber Room (Catherine’s Palace, Pushkin) was attacked by German soldiers, among whom was a team of experts in the export of art values, the panels were removed and sent to Koenigsberg.
Here she was until the spring of 1945. According to the German newspaper Königsberg Algemeine Zeitung, the art critic Alfred Rode organized an exhibition of precious stones and some elements of the decoration of the Amber Room (sheltered in a safe place) at the Prussian Museum of Art on November 13, 1941. In 1944, when the Germans retreated, the panels were again dismantled, folded into boxes and sent to an unknown destination. Since then, the Amber Room has remained lost.
The revival of the masterpiece
In 1979, the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR decided to recreate the amber panels.
In 1983, based on photographs and negatives, the Amber Room in the Catherine Palace began a revival designed by architect A. A. Kedrinsky. In 1994, the first panels were installed in the lower tier, and two years later the work on the "Vision" mosaic was completed. In April 2000, a chest of drawers of Russian work and a mosaic of "Touch and Smell" discovered in Germany, which were part of the decoration of the room, returned to the museum.
In June 2003, in honor of the centenary of St. Petersburg, in Pushkin (Catherine’s Palace), the Amber Room was opened for visitors. The 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 Palace): where it is, opening hours
The city of Pushkin, in which the museum is located, is located 25 kilometers from St. Petersburg.
Currently, the Catherine Palace (Amber Room) is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., the only day off is Tuesday, and every last Monday of the month is a sanitary day.
In the summer, tourist groups and official delegations are served from 10 to 16 hours, and from 16 to 17 - admission by tickets for individual visitors. If custom groups are not available, individual visitors may be served at other times. Tickets are not pre-sold, they must be bought at the box office located in the lobby of the palace (Pushkin, Tsarskoye Selo, Catherine Palace).
The amber room, the visit of which is paid, offers discounts for some categories of the population. So, the cost of tickets for adults is 400 rubles, and for students, university students of Russia, as well as pensioners of the Russian Federation and Belarus - 300 rubles. Such ticket prices were set by the Catherine Palace. A tour of the halls (including the Amber Room) is paid separately.