Description:
Geraldine Norman, the English cultural reporter and author, has written a scholarly page-turner about the political intrigue, murders, royal indiscretions, property seizures, heroic preservation efforts, wartime crises, obscenely prodigal spending, and equally obscene fiscal cutbacks that have shaped the long history of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. It puts our millennial excesses in perspective to learn that the Russian empress Catherine the Great bought Old Master paintings at the rate of one every other day from 1762 to 1772, tapering down to one or two a week for the next couple of decades. Catherine dubbed her royal digs the "hermitage," or retreat, "where she could forget her rank and relax," writes Norman. (One of Catherine's rules: Visitors "shall be joyful but shall not try to damage, break, or gnaw at anything.") The empress was "gluttonous"--her own word--in her acquisition of art, buying 4,000 paintings, massive amounts of classical sculptures, porcelains and other decorative arts, the stray Michelangelo marble or two, and a national treasury's worth of engraved gems. Plus 38,000 books, not to mention four roomfulls of prints. And that's just part of the collection. Reading Norman's well-crafted tale of the great museum, a reader absorbs vast amounts of history and fiscal detail, while turning pages through machine-gun fire, lovers' trysts, clandestine international negotiations, and other thrills. --Peggy Moorman
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