The Hermitage Museum, the second-largest art museum in the world, located at the center of the Saint Petersburg near Neva River, was founded by Empress Catherine the Great in 1764 when she acquired an captivating collection of paintings from a Berlin merchant. She selected a portion in her residence to open a personal gallery for her collection and fondly named it my hermitage. However, as her ardent effort to collect various artworks increased with time, and she became passionate to collect sculptures and pieces of jewelry, along with her former passion for paintings, the private collection became huge within her lifetime, enriched with more than 4000 paintings, around 38000 books, and around 60000 other items comprising drawing, jewelry, and other artworks. The Hermitage was reconstructed by Nicholas I and was opened to the public in 1852.

Over the years till the Russian Revolution of 1917, many artworks such as the Arsenal Collections, and many other artifacts, paintings, sculptures, and pieces of jewelry from all around the world, were added to its collection, making it the largest art museum in the world at some point of time.

After the October Revolution in 1917, the Winter Palace, the former imperial residence was declared as a state museum, along with the Hermitage, and eventually, both merged. During that time, when collections from several palaces of the Tsars and numerous private mansions were nationalized and reallocated in different major Soviet state museums, an imposing collection of 19 th century European paintings was shifted from the Academy of Arts to the Hermitage. Unfortunately, the Soviet government cared little for the artworks, and between 1930 and 1934, more than two thousand works of art from the Hermitage were sold at auctions abroad or directly to foreign officials and business people.

The items among others, Venus with a Mirror, by Titian, Alba Madonna, by Raphael, Annunciation, by Jan van Eyck, and many other masterpieces by Rembrandt, Botticelli, Van Dyck, and others. It is said that Joseph Stalin ordered to dispose of that invaluable collection to procure industrial machinery from the West.

During the Siege of Leningrad by Nazi Germany in World War II, two bombs and several shells damaged the museum buildings. But before the onset of the siege, a considerable part of the collections were evacuated to Yekaterinburg, formerly known as Sverdlovsk, by two trains which were brought back in October 1945, and the museum was reopened in November 1945. However, some of the art pieces were mutilated or destroyed during the War, when people were sheltered in the museum. Nevertheless, the damage was substantially compensated as the Red Army overtook some of the museums and private collections in Germany during the last lap of WWII, and the plundered paintings and artworks were housed in the Hermitage.

Originally, the only building that housed the art collection initiated by Catherine the Great, was the Small Hermitage, and today the enormous collection of the Hermitage Museum occupies a large complex of six historic buildings along the Palace Embankment. Apart from the Small Hermitage, the museum now includes the Old Hermitage, also known as the Large Hermitage, the New Hermitage, the Hermitage Theatre, the grand Winter Palace, formerly the main residence of the Russian Tsars, and the Menshikov Palace, the first stone building in the city. However, the Museum of Porcelain, Storage Facility at Staraya Derevnya, and the eastern wing of the General Staff Building are also part of the museum.

The enormous collection of the State Hermitage, out of which only a small part is on permanent display, comprises more than three million items, dating from the Stone Age to the present. It houses one of the world’s richest collections of western European paintings from the 13th to 20th centuries, including several masterpieces by Renaissance Italian, Baroque Dutch, French, and Flemish painters, displayed in about 120 rooms, on the first and second floors of the four main buildings. It also has an extensive collection of Asian art, especially of Central Asia. The Egyptian collection is displayed in a large hall on the ground floor in the eastern part of the Winter Palace, while a modest collection of Ancient Mesopotamia, including a number of Assyrian reliefs from Babylon, Nimrud, and Dur-Sharrukin is located in another part of the same building.

Ten colossal Atlantes figures, representing an artist, a philosopher, or a scientist in history, are guarding the entrance of the New Hermitage. The ground floors of the Old and the New Hermitage buildings are mostly occupied by the enormous collection of classical antiquities. The massive 8'4 feet (2'57 m) high Kolyvan Vase, weighing 19 tons and made of jasper in 1843, is housed in the Room of the Great Vase in the western wing of the New Hermitage and was installed before the walls of the room were erected. As a mark of honour, a big room in the Old or the Large Hermitage is named after Leonardo da Vinci, despite it contains only two of his masterpieces, the Benois Madonna, and The Litta Madonna. The Pavilion Hall, located on the first floor of the Northern Pavilion in the Small Hermitage, contains the 18th century golden Peacock Clock, created by James Cox. Out of the two treasure galleries, the first one, comprising four small rooms on the ground floor of the New Hermitage, contains western jewelry from the 4th millennium BC to the early 20th century AD. The second treasure gallery, located on the ground floor in the southwest corner of the Winter Palace, features jewelry from the Pontic steppes or Pontic-Caspian steppes, Caucasus, and Asia, especially Scythian, the ancient tribes of nomadic warriors, originally living in present southern Siberia, and Sarmatian gold.Since 1940, the Egyptian collection has also occupied a large hall on the ground floor in the eastern part of the Winter Palace.

Initially designed in the Greek revival style for the display of coins, the Knights' Hall, one of the largest rooms in the eastern part of the New Hermitage,hosts a collection of Western European arms and the development of the Armour's craft from the 15th century to the 17th centuries. Adjoining the Knight’s Hall, the Gallery of the History of Ancient Painting features some neoclassical fascinating marble sculptures, including the Three Graces and Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss, by Antonio Canova, and other sculptures created by his followers. The gallery opens in the middle to the main staircase of the New Hermitage, which is now closed.

Adorned with 19th-century Russian lapidary works, three large interior spaces on the first floor of the New Hermitage contain the paintings of the Italian and Spanish artists of the 10th to 18th centuries, which include Tintoretto, Veronese, Velazquez, Murillo, and Pittoni.

An incomplete marble sculpture of a naked boy crouching is the only piece of work by Michelangelo in the Hermitage Museum, located in one of the smaller rooms alongside the skylight rooms.