Stroganov Palace

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Stroganov Palace

The Stroganov Palace ( Russian Строгановский дворец ) is a Baroque palace in Saint Petersburg ( Russia ), completed in 1754, and one of the original Baroque buildings by the Italian architect Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli .

The palace is located on the boulevard Nevsky Prospect, immediately east of the Green Bridge over the Moika ( House 17 ). The two front facades face the Nevsky Prospect and the Moika embankment.

history

The development of the property at the intersection of what was then Newski Perspective Street with the Moika embankment began in the 1730s. In 1742 Baron Sergei Grigoryevich Stroganow , a representative of the Stroganow family of industrialists and at the same time an important art collector, acquired the property with a still unfinished house. The completion of this house under the new owner prevented a major fire in 1752, which mainly destroyed the nearby wooden buildings, but also caused the house at the Moika crossing to burn down to the ground. Shortly afterwards, Stroganov decided to have a new residential residence built here. The fact that the architect chose Rastrelli, who was actually only allowed to accept orders from the Russian imperial court at that time, can only be explained by the fact that Baron Stroganov was very close to the court and through the marriage of one of his nieces to a nephew Catherine I. also had a relationship with the Romanov house.

Count Alexander S. Stroganov

From 1753 to 1754, Rastrelli built today's three-storey palace, including the wing on the side of Moika-Uferstrasse and the 50 parade halls inside, using the foundations and partly also the foundation walls of the burned down house. Of the latter, the great hall and the central vestibule are preserved in their original state. From 1753 Rastrelli lived as an honorary resident in the palace, which was named after the client and the owner of the building. After the death of Sergei Stroganov in 1756, his son Baron (later Count) Alexander Sergejewitsch Stroganow inherited the palace. Like his father, Alexander Stroganov was considered an important art collector and, among other things, housed his collection of minerals in the palace , which can now be viewed again in the mineral collection . It was also he who initiated a renovation of the palace interior at the end of the 18th century, with most of the parade halls taking on their current classical instead of baroque shape. The then still young builder Andrei Voronikhin was involved in this renovation . Voronikhin was one of Stroganov's serfs who believed in his artistic talent and enabled him to get a solid education. In addition to Voronikhin , Fyodor Demerzow , a classicist city architect of the late 18th century, designed the interior.

After the death of Alexander Stroganov, the palace was taken over by his son Count Pawel Alexandrowitsch Stroganow , and the residence belonged to the Stroganov family until the early 20th century. The last owner until the nationalization of the palace after the October Revolution was Count Sergei Alexandrovich Stroganov , under whom a garden with a small exposition of statues and sculptures from the Alexander Stroganov collection was laid out in the courtyard of the palace. In 2003 this garden had to give way to a restaurant with a glass dome.

In the 1920s, the nationalized palace, including the art collections, had the status of a branch of the Hermitage and was open to the public as an art museum. However, in 1929 the museum was closed. Some of the works of art located there were transferred to the Winter Palace and other exhibition and storage rooms of the Hermitage, another part was given to other art museums in the country, but some were also auctioned in other European countries and were thus irretrievably lost to Russia. From 1937 the palace was used as the administrative headquarters of several organizations for several decades and deteriorated noticeably by the end of the 1980s.

In 1988 the palace was given museum status again and was incorporated into the Russian Museum . The two main facades were restored in the 1990s, and renovation of the interior began in the early 2000s.

architecture

Great Hall of the Stroganov Palace

Today the palace is the only building on Nevsky Prospect that has retained the original Baroque forms from the mid-18th century without major changes. Numerous decorative elements such as the concave roof gable above the central portal, the porticos in the center of the facade or the window frames with decorative ornamentation above and below (some historians consider the reliefs of a male person in profile to be Rastrelli's self-portraits) fall on the facades facing Nevsky Prospect and to the Moika and are characteristic of the architectural style elements of the heyday of the Petersburg Baroque. The fresh pink facade painting with decorative elements in white gives the facades a solemn appearance, also typical of the mature baroque. The crowning element of the exterior decor is the roof gable facing the Nevsky Prospect, in the middle of which a relief image of the Stroganov family coat of arms reminds of the building's namesake.

In terms of interior design, the only parade hall that has largely retained Rastrelli's baroque design and, unlike the other 50 or so halls, was not affected by the classicist renovation at the end of the 18th century should be mentioned in particular. In the ensemble of classicist parade halls, the picture gallery, the parade dining room and the mineral cabinet of Count Alexander S. Stroganow are worth mentioning.

Todays situation

In 1995 the palace opened to visitors as a branch of the Russian Museum for the first time since it was closed in 1929. The restoration of most of the parade halls, which had been severely damaged in the decades of external use, took place in the run-up to the 2003 celebrations for the 300th anniversary of the founding of the city of Petersburg. Currently three halls are still unrenovated and closed to visitors, including the former picture gallery, where restoration work is currently underway.

In addition to the permanent exposition of the Russian Museum in the palace - that is the mineral cabinet with the original collection of partly rare minerals from the collection of Alexander S. Stroganow - there are regularly changing themed exhibitions from the holdings of the Russian Museum as well as others in the individual parade halls of the building Russian and foreign museums. There is also a wax museum in the palace , the figures of which represent not only all the members of the Stroganov House, but also representatives of the imperial court and the architects who helped design the palace.

literature

  • BMKirikov, LAKirikova, OVPetrova: Nevskij Prospect. Dom za domom . Centrpoligraf, St. Petersburg / Moscow, 3rd edition 2009, ISBN 978-5-9524-4205-4
  • AGMitrofanov: Progulki po Sankt-Peterburgu. Nevsky prospect . Kljutsch-S publishing house, Moscow 2010, ISBN 978-5-93136-125-3

Individual evidence

  1. Exposition “Mineralienkabinett” on the official website of the Russian Museum ( Memento of the original from June 9, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.rusmuseum.ru
  2. Aktuell.ru: Stroganov Palace opens its mineral cabinet , May 26, 2005

Web links

Commons : Stroganov Palace  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 59 ° 56 ′ 8.7 ″  N , 30 ° 19 ′ 14.4 ″  E