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Amber Room, Catherine the Great palace
Amber Room is located in Catherine
the Great's palace in Pushkin town. Here you can learn the story of the
Amber Room creation, loss and reconstruction written
by the art historian
Dr. Burkhardt Göres
who had followed with close attention the
Amber Room recreation progress since his first trip to
Leningrad in 1967.
" ... Colleagues at the Hermitage enabled me to
meet Anatoli Kuchumov in 1969, the main custodian at
Pavlovsk, who had been an employee in the Tsarskoye Selo
palaces administration before 1945 and had as early as 1946
started to look for the Amber Room, which had been taken by
the German army in 1941 from the Catherine Palace to Königsberg. I told him what I had found during my training
at the Berliner Gemäldegalerie: I had come across a letter
in which Dr. Alfred Rohde, Director of the Königsberg Art
Collections, informed Professor Ernst Zimmermann, Director
of the Gemäldegalerie, after the first two large British
bomb raids on Königsberg in August 1944 that the loaned
miniatures of the Gemäldegalerie and treasures from its own
collections were safe and sound in a tower shelter and that
the Amber Room was also largely undamaged, with only a few
panels having been destroyed during the fire. It was not
until the spring of 1945 that one lost track of the room.
At Kuchumov's request I obtained for his
research in Kaliningrad a photocopy of a 1942 Königsberg
city map from the state library in Berlin. Later I was able
to let him have a miraculously preserved brilliant
photograph of the elements of the Amber Room in Königsberg,
which had been sent to me by Professor Margarete Kühn,
Director of the West Berlin Palaces Administration.
In 1979, the Soviet Government officially
decided that the Amber Room was to be reconstructed. In
1980, I had the good fortune of meeting in a St. Petersburg
attic workshop a group of young restorers boldly seeking to
recreate the “8th Wonder of the World“. A year later the
Tsarskoye Selo Palaces Administration had another
restoration workshop where the “9th Wonder of the World“ was
now being meticulously created. During each subsequent visit
to Tsarskoye Selo I witnessed the fresh success made in
achieving this huge task, which impressed me above all by
the artistic quality of the work going far beyond good
workmanship, and by the strict scientific approach
simultaneously adopted. The restorers very carefully
examined the photographic documentation, created models from
plasticine and plaster before actually using the valuable
amber, and did not take any artistic liberties. The driving
force on this long journey over several decades was
Alexander Kedrinski, the senior architect responsible for
the reconstruction of the Catherine Palace, under whose
aegis the ceiling painting, the precious intarsia floor and
the sculpted woodwork of the room had already been
recreated.
I was regularly informed of the details of
the work, the success achieved and the difficulties
encountered by my old friends who were among the founding
members of the workshop: Alexander Shuravlov, who headed it
for one and a half decades, Albert Vanin, the experienced
representative of the older generation, and Alexander Krylov,
who was then still a young virtuoso of his discipline and is
now responsible for the high-quality artistic execution. The
first complete model of the Amber Room created by Krylov in
his spare time during the work on the Amber Room is now the
center piece of the “Aricalex“ collection in Berlin, which
presents models of historical buildings, and a symbol of the
great masterly skills of Russian amber restorers.
The difficulty and global nature of the task
already became clear to the masters while working on the
first scaled-down model of a wall from the room - this was
not a copy in the usual sense in which it is possible to
compare the copy with the original at all times. When an
item is recreated, demands are made on the restorer - like
the original creator - above all in his capacity as an
artist. Until the problem was solved by the use of
photogrammetry, it was only possible to determine the height
and depth of profiles by specimen models. However, in any
activity of this kind, sculptural details are always
determined first and foremost by the master's artistic
sensitivity.
In those 20 years the most difficult
sculptural details, formed with the aid of plasticine, were
primarily the responsibility of the workshop's experienced
modeller, Yekaterina Anosina, and later her son until his
accident. The amber carvers themselves gained access to the
secrets of their sophisticated work by restoring historical
amber arte facts from various museums. Particularly
important in this connection was the restoration of a large
amber chest on which the initials of Gottfried Thurau, one
of the creators of the Amber Room, were discovered. Copying
various models from museums trained the eyes and hands of
the specialists. Studying old formulae made experiments and
comparisons possible. By comparing old black-and-white
photographs with photographs of newly created amber parts of
the room it proved possible to move closer and closer to the
original hues of the paneling. Heating and boiling the thin
amber pieces in a special mixture allowed the desired hue to
be achieved, thus coming as near as possible to the
original. Polished, numbered and matched, the amber parts,
produced from the same amber obtained in the vicinity of
former Königsberg as used 300 years ago by the creators of
the lost Amber Room, were mounted on the wooden supports
using a glue specifically developed for this purpose in the
workshop. The frequent use of engravings with underlying
film and the relief of the carved parts all add to the wide
spectrum of colors and sculptural elements of the amber,
which is by nature extremely rich and diverse in its shades
of color.
The first task handled by the restorers was
the base panels, which were also the first to be given their
traditional place in the room of the palace where the
splendid original had been from 1755. Then they started
working on the large panels with mounted frames. The scale
of the work led to a significant extension of the workshop,
which recruited not only further talented amber restorers
but also gem carvers for the mosaics.
And then perestroika occurred. Though it was
now possible to breathe more freely, life simultaneously
became much harder and major cultural projects, whose
funding had previously been guaranteed by the government,
lost their most important sponsor in the new market
environment. Despite the efforts by Professor Ivan Sautov,
General Director of the Tsarskoye Selo Museums, the
activities of the amber masters workshop faced the prospect
of coming to a complete halt because of a lack of funds.
Desiring to support the workshop in any way possible, I
arranged for the restoration of two amber items from the
collection of Berlin's Kunstgewerbemuseum. However, such
isolated “rescue operations“ failed to alleviate the overall
critical situation.
This was not fundamentally changed until a
real rescue initiative was launched by Ruhrgas (now E.ON
Ruhrgas AG) from Essen in Germany, which was extensively
involved in Russia. The company decided in 1999 on the
occasion of its anniversary to act as sponsor for the new
amber marvel and safeguard the financing of the
reconstruction of the Amber Room in time for St.
Petersburg´s anniversary in 2003. As a member of the
advisory committee for the reconstruction of the Amber Room,
I was in the fortunate position of witnessing a twofold
revival: intensive work on the panelling in the Amber Room
and at the workshop in Tsarskoye Selo with its unrivalled
masters and unique creative potential.
As far as the original of the lost Amber Room
is concerned, the last few years produced not only new
speculation about its possible whereabouts but also genuine
sensations. One day the chief of the Potsdam police informed
me in confidence that an allegedly original Florentine
mosaic from the Amber Room, inserted in paneling by Tsarina
Elisabeth after 1755, was being offered in Bremen under
suspicious circumstances. My task was to determine whether
it was actually the original. During my next visit to the
amber masters workshop I discovered, however, that an
excellent reproduction lay almost finished on the
work-bench. In order to be well equipped for identifying the
mosaic in Bremen, I received good advice from the gem
carvers and restorers, and Deputy Director Larissa
Bardovskaya provided me with detailed enlargements of old
photographs of this mosaic.
During the subsequent feigned purchase in
Bremen under the responsibility of Peter Schultheiss from
the criminal police in Potsdam, I was convinced of the
authenticity of the mosaic. This led to its immediate
confiscation and subsequently its solemn return by the
German Government to the Russian Government. Together with
the mosaic, a chest of drawers, which had stood in the Amber
Room before the Second World War and was rediscovered in a
German private collection, was returned. When the German
Interior Ministry asked me to confirm the origin of the
chest, which was not difficult, it was nonetheless clear to
everyone concerned that these discoveries, though important
in their own right, could not at all advance the search for
the original Amber Room because the chest was not linked to
the room in any way and because the mosaic had, as it turned
out, been stolen by an officer of the German army before the
Amber Room was transferred to Königsberg.
Even though the tragic fate of the Amber Room
during the war is still a mystery in many respects, the
bizarre history of its creation in Prussia became ever
clearer to me and was gradually freed of traditional errors
and misinterpretations when I began to study and compare the
archival and graphic sources. For example, I discovered that
it was not the famous Andreas Schlüter, as previously
assumed, but his important rival Johann Friedrich Eosander
who was the author of the project, which was originally
planned for the royal palace in Charlottenburg but later in
an extended form for the residence of Frederick I in
Oranienburg. It was also possible in Berlin to trace the
actual journey taken by the finished walls. Finished in the
course of 12 years by the master amber turners Gottfried
Wolffram, Gottfried Thurau and Ernst Schacht, they were not
moved until 1713 from the armoury in Marstall (and not the
Zeughaus arsenal, as always claimed) to the Berlin palace as
paneling for Frederick William I's “tobacco club“. But only
three years later they were dismantled to be taken to
distant Russia as a valuable gift to Tsar Peter I, for which
– as he said – he had long yearned.
Everyone concerned about the artistic
heritage had long wanted the “8th Wonder of the World“ to be
returned to its second home in Tsarskoye Selo. Though it
became ever clearer over the years that this was a futile
hope, we are now able to convince ourselves that the new
amber marvel we are receiving from the hands of today's
talented Russian masters is in no way inferior to the
original and undoubtedly deserves to be described as one of
the wonders of the world, irrespective of the status
assigned to it by grateful contemporaries and their
descendants. Against this background, the historical
significance of the unique initiative taken by Ruhrgas AG
(now E.ON Ruhrgas AG) with its Board Chairman Friedrich
Späth and its Board member Achim Middelschulte, to whom we
are indebted for the idea and its implementation, cannot be
overrated."
by Dr. Burkhardt Göres,
Director of Palaces, Prussian Palaces and
Gardens Foundation, Berlin-Brandenburg
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