The State Hermitage Publishing House has brought out a new album – Cherdaki Zimnego dvortsa [The Attics of the Winter Palace]. The author is Sergei Anatolyevich Matsenkov, a researcher in the Scientific Restoration and Conservation Sector of the Department of the History and Restoration of Architectural Monuments.
The scholarly publication provides an exclusive opportunity for readers to let themselves be transported to the attics of the Winter Palace, a world inaccessible to visitors that retains the unique flavour of a bygone era. Present-day photographs of the attic spaces are accompanied by watercolours painted by the mid-19th-century artists Eduard Hau, Konstantin Ukhtomsky, Luigi Premazzi, Joseph-Maria Charlemagne and Alexander Kolb.
“Enormous spaces have survived in the Hermitage where time seems to have stood still – the attics. Finding yourself there is like being taken into the past in a time-machine. The attics of today’s Hermitage were created at the same time as the buildings, but later changes barely affected them,” the author states. “Here on the ‘outer fringes’ of the Hermitage, behind massive iron doors with locks that close with a dull clunk, people are hardly ever seen and an atmosphere of quiet and mystery prevails. It is as if time itself has stopped. It is hard to believe that such large and unusual spaces – like something from another, parallel dimension – exist literally a few feet above the Hermitage halls familiar to everyone.”
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