The Department owns a fine collection of Russian glassware totalling more than 3,000 items. This includes sumptuous large goblets with engraved designs and gilt ornamentation, made in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries at the Izmailovo (near Moscow) and Yamburg factories; articles produced by the St Petersburg Glassworks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the products of the Maltsev and Alexei Bakhmetyev glassworks; and coloured glass objects which appeared in the mid-eighteenth century after Lomonosov discovered the secret of making smalt.
Gold- and silverwork and jewellery from the late seventeenth to early twentieth centuries are illustrated in the Hermitage by over 11,000 items. The collection contains works crafted by silversmiths in Moscow, St Petersburg, Novgorod, Veliky Ustiug, Kostroma, and Tobolsk. There are articles intended for the court and the nobility, such as ladles and goblets presented as a reward for loyal service, salvers, plates, vases (often made in commemoration of historical events), as well as personal ornaments: finger rings, earrings, and breast chains decorated with river pearls, tourmalines, coloured enamels, and Siberian emeralds. The work of such artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as P. Semionov, A. Grigoryev, I. Liebmann, Yu. Landt, and V. Sorkovanov is well represented.
Foremost among the Hermitage masterpieces of silverwork is the monumental tomb of St Alexander Nevsky, the military leader and statesman of Old Russia. It was made by craftsmen at the St Petersburg Mint in 1747—52 from silver mined in the Altai Mountains, and weighs about 1.5 tons. In addition to the sarcophagus, which is covered with scenes in high relief, showing episodes from the life of St Alexander Nevsky, and has verses by Lomonosov engraved on its surfaces, there are a many-tiered pyramid, two pedestals displaying various articles of military equipment, and a pair of large candelabra. The abundance of decorative detail, and the asymmetrical, highly dynamic composition of this memorial reflect the influence of the Baroque which was dominant in Europe at the time.
The superb craftsmanship of Russian silversmiths is also exemplified by a collection of snuff-boxes, goblets, cups, pitchers, and other items decorated with niello, which were made for the most part in Moscow in the seventeenth century, and in Veliky Ustiug in the eighteenth.
The collection of enamels numbers approximately 500 items, of which those made in Veliky Ustiug in the eighteenth century deserve particular attention. From 1761 to 1776 the Popov factory there produced very beautiful and ingenious articles, such as large dinner services of silver and non-precious metals, completely covered with enamel, mainly white, and decorated with silver trimmings and delicate painting in silver.
The collection of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century jewellery comprises articles manufactured at the Fabergé, Sazikov, Ovchinnikov, and Grachov factories.
One of the most remarkable in the Hermitage is the distinguished collection of art objects in steel, made by the armourers of Tula. Of the five hundred such works recorded in various museums, three hundred are in the Hermitage. The collection contains articles of furniture, lighting fittings, vases, writing sets, perfume burners, caskets and coffers, snuff-boxes, and samovars. All these show the unrivalled skill and exquisite taste of the Tula craftsmen. The decorative effect of their work is based on the combination of ormolu and steel, either faceted to look like precious stones, or burnished blue, with its surface polished like a mirror. There are occasional examples of Tula steel in many museums all over the world, including those of London and Berlin.
The collection of artistic metalwork in bronze, tin, steel, iron, and cast iron has some interesting eighteenth-century examples of copperware: loving-cups, jugs, cups, large chased sconces with representations of the city arms of St Petersburg or of flowers, and also a tray made in 1723 at Yekaterinburg.
Decorative articles for the court — in jasper, malachite, lapis lazuli, agate, cornelian, porphyry, and rhodonite — were produced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at the Peterhof, Yekaterinburg, and Kolyvan Lapidary Works. The Hermitage collection is the best in the Soviet Union and includes huge vases, bowls, elegant obelisks, lampstands, and a large number of smaller items, all done by gifted Russian craftsmen.
The collection of Russian furniture from the late seventeenth to early twentieth centuries boasts many fine items designed by the architects Charles Cameron, Giacomo Quarenghi, Vasily Stasov, Carlo Rossi, and Leo Klenze, as well as articles by the well-known St Petersburg cabinet-makers Christian Meyer, Heinrich and Piotr Gambs, Vasily Bobkov, and André Tour, and by craftsmen of the town of Archangel.
The Department possesses a very varied collection of walrus ivory, ranging from small pendants and spillikins to writing-desks, all made by bonecarvers from Kholmogory, well known for their skill in this art. The collection includes very rare items crafted by O. Dudin and N. Vereshchagin at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The delicate carving, openwork decoration, and original designs of the compositions are indicative of the great respect these masters had for the agelong traditions of their art.
There are many examples of the art of woodcarving: distaffs, round birch bark boxes, caskets of varying shapes, sizes, and ornamentation, gingerbread boards, ladles, salt-cellars, handled bowls, and other household objects.
The collection of textiles and costumes numbers over 20,000 items. The costume section contains many excellent examples dating from the late seventeenth to early twentieth centuries, each one a work of art in its own right. The textiles section comprises a rich assortment of Russian fabrics of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The world-famous Kolokoltsov shawls, for example, a type made only in Russia, were woven by serf craftswomen from very finely spun goat’s down on both sides (i.e. there is no wrong side on the finished cloth) and had ornamental floral borders, worked in an amazing variety of hues and tints.
The Hermitage is proud of possessing the largest collection of flags and banners in the world — about 6,500 items dating from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. They are interesting from both the historical and artistic point of view. In addition to Russian regimental colours, there are banners from Sweden, Prussia, France, and Oriental countries, as well as standards, Turkish horsetails, ensigns, insignia, and flags from over fifty countries. Old Russian banners are represented by a collection dating from the seventeenth century. The huge banner of the streltsi (the shooters) regiment, with an icon of the Last Judgment on one side, and portraits of the Tsars Peter and Ivan on the other, dates from the 1680s.
And, finally, one must mention the unique collection of sixteenth- to nineteenth-century instruments, which contains rare sundials and sidereal clocks, telescopes, drawing and geodetic instruments, including some made in the workshops of the Academy of Sciences under the supervision of Mikhail Lomonosov and Ivan Kulibin. Among the various serrated saws and copying lathes of Peter the Great’s time there is some interesting machinery with self-propelled supports of advanced design, whose invention is usually accredited to Andrei Nartov.
The Department’s exhibitions are supplemented by displays arranged in several state rooms of the Winter Palace. The Concert Hall (designed by Quarenghi in 1793 and rebuilt by Stasov in 1839 after its destruction by fire in 1837) — an interior faced with white stucco — houses an exhibition of seventeenth- to twentieth-century Russian silver. The famous Malachite Room (1838—1839, designed by Alexander Briullov), whose malachite decor is unique, is connected with the events of the October Revolution. Here the counter-revolutionary Provisional government held its meetings. On the night of 25—26 October (N. S. 7—8 November) 1917, the ministers were arrested in the room next door (the so-called Private Dining Room) by the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. In 1957 the Private Dining Room was turned into a memorial room and furnished as it had been in 1917.