Okay, that’s a big one: Kunstkamera
This was the 1st ever museum in Russia founded by Peter the Great in 1724, and today also goes under another name — Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography. They’ve even got a website – you can look it up (not that you’re gonna find anything super valuable over there though (the blokes are super overdue for a redesign) unless you’re in town and wanna plan a visit – just an fyi that it’s there😅).
In a nutshell, the exhibits you can find there are of a very rare anatomic kind. And I mean it — very damn rare. A so called ‘cabinet of curiosities’. The name Kunstkamera is derived from German Kunstkamer, literally meaning “Art chamber”. Man, I don’t know what our dear Peter thought the word ‘art’ entailed, but, trust me, one visit will be enough to enlighten the crap out of you. Read on.
Construction took 8 years: 1719–1727.
Architect: Georg Johann Mattarnovi, a German Baroque architect and sculptor. No one knows when he was born, but the year of his death is the same when the construction works started (1719). He did finish the project design of the building before that though, which was followed throughout the construction years. Kunstkamera is the only project of his own that is left today. He also designed the 3rd version of the Winter Palace, the residence of the Russian royal families, which was redesigned into its 4th and last version by Bartolomeo Rastrelli in the 1730s. The building designed by Mattarnovi was torn down, and Giacomo Quarenghi built the Hermitage Theater on the site in 1787. I know, right? Those Italians…🙈
Style: Petrine Baroque, created by and named after — who would you think? He built the whole town from scratch after all, so obviously could afford any style that town to be in😅 — Peter I. He was longing for simplicity and class, which was yet to be desired from the preceding monopolistic style called Naryshkin Baroque that was favoured by the Russian royals before Peter came to power in 1682. Petrine Baroque was a dramatic departure from Byzantine traditions to modest Dutch, Danish, and Swedish architecture of the time. Peter was the first Russian monarch to travel outside of Russia and this travel exposed him to the architecture of many other countries.
So, cabinet of curiosities, huh? In 16–17 centuries such collections were the property of many royal courts. Peter got inspired after seeing them during his trips abroad. Starting from 1704, he issued a number of decrees ordering malformed, still-born infants and other uncommon rarities as examples of nature’s accidents to be sent from all over the country to the imperial collection. This laid the foundation for the collection which you can see at Kunstkamera today.
10 years later, in 1724, just 1 year before Peter’s death, the Academy of Sciences was established by his order, which made Kunstkamera and the Library created simultaneously with it its first institutions, the “cradle” of the St. Petersburg (Russian) Academy of Sciences.
Today, the Kunstkamera building is both a symbol and a logo of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The collection now is probably 150 times bigger than it was at the beginning, and, in addition to the anatomic section with infants with cyclopia, two-headed lamb and Siamese twins etc. (all perfectly conserved!), you can find 6 more sections representing different geographical regions and typical exhibits. It’s the museum of anthropology and ethnography, after all🤷🏻♀️
– Julia xx
