The hermitage, or the art of collecting immensity

01The palace that devoured Europe

What fascinates about the Hermitage is first its architecture, that baroque beast designed to overwhelm the visitor. The Winter Palace, Bartolomeo Rastrelli’s masterpiece, is a creature of a thousand windows, a colossus of pink and white stone looming over Palace Square like a flagship. Its facades, stretching 250 meters, are a political manifesto: "Look," they declare to foreign ambassadors, "Russia is no longer a land of fur-clad boyars, but a European power." Inside, the halls unfold like acts in a Shakespearean tragedy—the Throne Room, where the Romanovs received Europe’s homage; the Malachite Room, where the deep green of Russian stone whispers of an empire stretching to the Urals’ mines; and finally, the painting galleries, where the canvases of Flemish and Italian masters seem to guard the court’s secrets.

But the Hermitage’s true genius lies in its relentless expansion. With each reign, every tsar added their stone to the edifice, as if the palace had to grow endlessly to contain the collectors’ insatiable hunger. Catherine II began with the Small Hermitage, a modest pavilion where she stored her first Rembrandts. Nicholas I built the New Hermitage, Russia’s first public museum, with its granite columns and vaulted halls like cathedrals. And even now, the museum keeps growing: in 2020, it annexed the former Communist Party headquarters, a Stalinist building soon to house the treasures of the East. The Hermitage is a hydra—cut off one wing, and two more will sprout.

02The empress who bought entire collections

Catherine II was no ordinary collector. Where other sovereigns commissioned portraits or landscapes, she bought whole collections, as if acquiring an empire. In 1764, she purchased Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky’s bankrupt holdings: 225 paintings, including Rembrandt’s Danaë, which would become one of the museum’s masterpieces. In 1772, it was Sir Robert Walpole’s turn, the former British prime minister—204 canvases, including Van Dycks, Rubens, and Poussin’s Bacchus, still enthroned in the Hall of Antiquities. And in 1779, she seized Pierre Crozat’s collection, a French financier who owned one of the world’s finest drawing collections.

But how did a Russian empress, ruling a country still seen as semi-barbaric in Europe, acquire so many masterpieces? The answer lies in two words: money and cunning. Catherine had spies in every European court, alerting her to collections for sale. She corresponded with Diderot, who acted as her art agent, and played European bankers against one another. "I am a thief," she wrote to Grimm, "but an honest thief." A thief, perhaps—but one who saved hundreds of works from dispersal or destruction. Without her, Danaë might have ended up in a Berlin attic, and Crozat’s drawings sold off piecemeal.

03The war of paintings: when art became loot

If Catherine II bought her collections, her successors sometimes stole them. The most striking example? Napoleon’s conquests. In 1812, when Russian troops entered Paris, they didn’t just burn Moscow in retaliation—they looted French palaces, carting off crates of paintings, sculptures, and art objects. The haul was colossal: canvases from Joséphine de Beauharnais’s collection, furniture from Versailles, even Gobelins tapestries. "We took everything that could be carried," wrote a Russian officer in his memoirs. "The rest, we burned."

Among the works brought back to Saint Petersburg, some became Hermitage icons. The Madonna Litta, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, allegedly seized from an Italian castle. Or Rubens’ Bacchus, taken from Malmaison. These paintings, torn from their original contexts, tell a darker story: that of a museum born of war, where every masterpiece is also a trophy. Even now, some countries demand their return. France, for instance, wants the Gobelins tapestries back. But the Hermitage resists: "These works are part of our history," its curators say. "They are no longer French; they are Russian."

04The Hermitage’s cats, or the art of living with three million works

In the museum’s basements, far from the gilded halls where tourists parade, lives a colony of cats. Seventy felines, fed, cared for, and even given a press service. Their mission? To protect the collections from rodents. Their story dates back to Catherine II’s time, when she imported cats from Kazan to hunt the mice gnawing at the canvases. Since then, each generation of mousers has guarded the Hermitage, surviving revolutions, sieges, and restorations.

These cats have become museum legends, so much so that visitors leave offerings—tins of tuna, plush toys—before a small statue erected in their honor. "They are our guardian angels," confides a curator. "Without them, the mice would have devoured our Rembrandts long ago." But the cats aren’t the only ones watching over the museum. In the storerooms, hundreds of restorers work in silence, mending torn canvases, reinforcing worm-eaten frames, breathing life back into forgotten works. For the Hermitage is not just a museum—it’s a living organism, where every painting, every vase, every diamond needs care, protection, love.

05Danaë, or the masterpiece that survived acid

Among the museum’s three million works, only one has been attacked with acid. In 1985, a man named Bronius Maigys approached Rembrandt’s Danaë, splashed vitriol on the canvas, and slashed it with a knife. "I did it for Lithuania!" he shouted before being subdued. The painting, one of the Dutch master’s most famous, seemed lost. Its golden surface, where Zeus appears as a shower of gold, was eaten away by the acid. Experts wept at the damage.

Yet, against all odds, Danaë survived. For twelve years, a team of restorers worked in secret, scraping away the corroded paint millimeter by millimeter, filling gaps with specially mixed pigments. Today, the painting is back on display, nearly intact. Only a few color nuances betray its ordeal. "It’s a resurrection," murmurs a visitor gazing at the canvas. "As if Rembrandt himself had watched over it."

06The museum that defied Hitler

The Hermitage’s story during World War II reads like a spy novel. In 1941, as German troops encircled Leningrad, the museum’s curators knew they had only days to save the collections. In secret, they packed 1.2 million works into wooden crates, loaded them onto trains, and sent them to the Urals, far from the bombs. The greatest masterpieces—Danaë, the Madonna Litta, Scythian treasures—were evacuated first. Meanwhile, in Leningrad, the employees who couldn’t flee kept working, despite cold and hunger. Some starved to death in the storerooms, surrounded by Rembrandts and Raphaels.

When the siege lifted in 1944, the collections were intact. The Germans, who had planned to plunder the museum, found only empty halls. "The Hermitage won the war," wrote a historian. "Not with tanks, but with wooden crates and courage." Today, a commemorative plaque honors the curators’ sacrifice. But the true monument is the works themselves, which survived the madness of men.

07The Hermitage today: between national treasure and global brand

Today, the Hermitage is more than a museum. It’s a brand, a cultural empire stretching far beyond Saint Petersburg. It has outposts in Amsterdam, Las Vegas (where it collaborated with the Guggenheim), and even a branch in Kazan. Its exhibitions tour the world, and its collections are available online, digitized with obsessive precision. "We are a 21st-century museum," declares its director, Mikhail Piotrovsky. "But we remain true to Catherine II’s spirit: collecting immensity."

Yet this expansion is not without controversy. Some critics accuse the Hermitage of "Disneyfication," sacrificing its soul to mass tourism. Others point to the war-looted works still unreturned. "A museum shouldn’t be a business," writes an art historian. "But the Hermitage has always been both: a temple and a vault."

Whatever the case, one thing is certain: the Hermitage remains a place like no other. A place where you can spend hours contemplating a Rembrandt, then descend to the basements to pet a cat guarding humanity’s treasures. A museum where every stone, every painting, every diamond tells a story—that of a painting-mad empress, an empire that sought to devour Europe, and a palace that, against all odds, survived everything. Even acid.