The man who knows all the Hermitage’s secrets – and he’s keeping them

My Hermitage: How the Hermitage Survived Tsars, Wars, and Revolution to Become the Greatest Museum in the World Mikhail Piotrovsky

Skira Rizzoli, pp.384, £30, ISBN: 9780847843787

The front cover of this book describes the Hermitage as ‘the Greatest Museum in the World’. That sobriquet must go to the Louvre. The Hermitage is perhaps the second greatest, one which its current director Mikhail Piotrovsky calls an ‘encyclopaedic’ museum, housing ‘the culture of humanity, which is represented in all its variety…’ Not quite.

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Taggedencyclopaedic museums, Louvre, Russian Ark, Soviet era, St Petersburg, the Met

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The man who knows all the Hermitage's secrets - and he's keeping them

This committee-ridden tome by the director of the Hermitage doesn’t reveal the beautiful, chaotic place I remember

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