For centuries, art lovers and collectors around the world have fantasized about rumors of hidden treasure in the basement of the Hermitage. With this curiosity, millions of people visit the St. Petersburg museum which stands on the left bank of the Neva. The city was renamed Leningrad after Lenin's death in 1924 and until September 6, 1991. The Hermitage is undoubtedly a place full of charm, intrigue and mystery. The Palace born as an imperial residence was built in the mid-700th century for the tsarina Elizabeth of Russia, but the creator of the museum was Catherine the Great. The project is of the Italian Bartolomeo Rastrelli, who left Italy at the age of fifteen to follow his sculptor father who had been called by Peter the Great. He became an architect during the reign of Elizabeth, and thanks to the knowledge of the Russian style and the Baroque he created what today we would define as a real architectural model: the "Barocco Rastrelliano". The Winter Palace, which later became the Hermitage, is considered his masterpiece. Catherine, after the death of her husband, Tsar of all the Russias, assassinated by a conspiracy, in 1762 decided to transform the imperial residence into something unique, decorating the rooms with the best works that could exist. He commissioned Denis Diderot, to buy all the masterpieces possible on the market, especially in France. Diederot, was lucky enough to find 400 masterpieces collected in a single collection, that of Crozat, an eccentric billionaire named “Poor” because she was considered the least wealthy person in the family. Later, in 1779, the Empress made her second major purchase, 198 extraordinary works for which she paid only £40. And from that moment she became the greatest collector in the world. But the Winter Palace could not accommodate all those paintings, so the Tsarina decided to build an art gallery near the palace which she called "my little hermitage“, a place surrounded by a garden so festive that in spring it became flowery with a thousand colors. All this while the marble fountains gushed and put the tsarina's soul in a good mood. In 1675 she also added a second gallery, the current old Hermitage. By 1774 the collection had grown to about two thousand paintings, and it was then that the mystery began to hover as to what really kept the Tsarina so privately. Indeed, he did not allow anyone to visit her collection, to the point that in a confidential letter to Diderot, he wrote "Only the mice and I can admire what I have". The tsars who succeeded Catherine continued to buy works, so ships full of Dutch masterpieces began to arrive. In 1839, the construction of another gallery and a theater was completed. Twenty years later, Nicholas I allowed – to a modest number of friends – access to the exhibition rooms all decorated with Italian and Caucasus marble, walls in malachite and gold, ceilings rich in stucco and floors in carved wood with a thousand shades . Marble stairs, gold trim and columns followed one another in a vast array of colors. Finally, the magnificence was completed in a room where all the frescoes painted by Raphael for the Vatican Rooms had been reproduced - to perfection. In the early years of the twentieth century two Muscovite merchants imported many paintings from Paris, they were little-known artists at the time, they were called Gauguin, Matisse e Van Gogh. And it was precisely with Matisse that they treated a large number of works at a low price, managing to buy forty of his wonderful paintings in one fell swoop.
In 1837, a fire broke out in the palace which lasted for five days, the fire almost completely destroyed the Winter Palace, but the Tsar Nicholas I immediately ordered to rebuild it. During the revolution of 1917 the palace became the headquarters of the socialist government Kerensky. It was Lenin's followers who dominated the situation without any damage, and thus it was that the Tsars disappeared from the political scene and from the imperial residence which became part of the Museum. With the First World War the two merchants were forbidden to buy French works, and in 1917 the Revolution confiscated all their paintings. But where did the paintings of Kandinsky e Chagall? Isn't it that they are hidden in cellars just because the Russians don't like them? The answer seems to be "No!” Will it be the truth or a legend? When the revolution needed money they sold some of their most important works to American art dealers such as Mellon, who bought many masterpieces for the National Gallery in Washington. We speak of works by Van Dyck o Rembrandt, But also Raffaello e Botticelli and, perhaps, also of Titian e Perugino. During the Second World War the city suffered a 900-day siege and the Hermitage was hit several times, six hundred rooms were destroyed by fire. Despite this, none of the works of art were lost because they had been preemptively shipped over the Ural Mountains. In the end it all came home amidst the rich decorations and precious inlays, the wealth of the tsars and the beauty of the art had united again. That's why - even today - impressionist art is the most desired and collected by Russians.
