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St Petersburg 2017 - Part Two - The Hermitage
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The Hermitage is a great museum of art in St Petersburg. It occupies several buildings but the ones we can visit are mainly in the Winter Palace which is on the Palace Embankment, next to the Neva River.

The museum was founded by Catherine the Great in 1754, and it has been open to the publiic since 1852. It reportedly has the largest collections of paintings in any museum in the world.

The ticket queues are notoriously long at the Hermitage, so I booked a two day pass online. The online tickets are decidedly more expensive but they were definitely worth it. Spending two hours in a queue is not my idea of fun.

Over the two day period, I spent about 8 hours wandering through the various parts of the Museum. I am sure that there were quite a few places in that vast edifice which I had not visited. Next time.

This is a corner of the huge Winter Palace, seen from the Palace Square, looking North.
The entrance to the Museum for those with online tickets in just behind the potico with the statues.
This canal runs between two parts of the Winter Palace. Beyond the bridge passageway we can see the Neva River.
We enter the Winter Palace.
A mosaic on the floor of the room in the photo above.
One of the painting galleries.
A gallery of sculptures from Ancient Greece and Rome.
The decoration in the huge rooms is worth a closer look.
This bullet hole in one of the mirrors facing the Neva River has been left as a reminder of the Siege of Leningrad in World War 2.
This is a part of the collection of arms and armour.
As a painter, I was naturally most interested in the fabulous collection of paintings in the Hermitage.

This is "The Birth of St John the Baptist", by Tintoretto.
"Madonna and Child", by Raphael.
"Boy with a dog", by Murillo.
"Still Life with an Ebony Chest", by Antonio Pereda.
"The Marsh", by Ruisdael.
"Portrait of a Man", by Frans Hals.
"Venus and Adonic", by Rubens.
"Head of an Old Man", by Rubens.
"Flora", by Rembrandt.
"The Apostles, Peter and Paul", by El Greco.
"The Adoration with Saints Francis and Jerome", by Ghirlandaio.
"The Benois Madonna", by Leonardo da Vinci.
"Landscape with the Legend of Saint Christopher", by Jan Mandijn.
"Sacra Conversazione", by Veronese.
Detail of "Judith", by Giorgione.
Triptych. "The Annunciation", by Jean Bellegambe.
"St Luke drawing the VIrgin", by Roger van der Weyden.
"Coast View with Apollo and the Cumaean Sybil", by Claude Lorrain.
We leave the Hermitage with a view of its roof, seen from the Palace Square.
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