Amber Room in the Palaces of the Tsars

Wieslaw Gierlowski

The Amber Room remains the most famous amber art work of all time, even though since August 1944, when it was packed into tightly closed chests in Königsberg Castle, and then taken to an unknown place, no person alive today has had the opportunity to see it.

Due to my age and long-standing collaboration with the team of Russian specialists who worked on the reconstruction of the Room’s decor in Tsarskoye Selo, I had the opportunity to meet Anatol Kuchumov, the last curator of the Amber Room. He held this position already in imperial times (from 1916) to when the Germans invaded Tsarskoye Selo on September 17, 1941, i.e. for 25 years. In spite of his everyday contact with this unique work, not only did it not lose any of the strength of the impression it made on him, but quite to the contrary, it filled him with fascination and love for the finest detail of the great composition. Surely, he infected me with some of his fascination.

In my attempt to present this work in a concise article, which can be only modestly illustrated due to the paucity of iconographic resources, I stand no chance of conveying the Room’s overwhelming charm and therefore must stick to rather dryly delivered facts.

The arrival of the gift from Berlin

The base of the final composition were formed by the elements of the decor of the amber cabinet of Prussian king Frederick I in the City Palace in Berlin presented to Tsar Peter I. Their total area amounted to 71.7 m², which was 83.4% of the entire 86.12 m² amber decoration of the walls of the future Amber Room.

The vast majority of these elements (68.5 m²) were made in Berlin, based on the design by Andreas Schlüter of Gdansk, by master amber craftsmen also from Gdansk (Gottfried Wolfram, Gottfried Turau and Ernst Schacht). The remaining part consisted of 3 earlier mirror frames (3.2 m²)

After receiving the gift, the tsar travelled on to Paris, which is why after the work was delivered to St Petersburg, it was inspected by a friend from the tsar’s youth, who became General-Governor, Prince Alexander Mienshikov. In his report dated July 5, 1717, Mienshikov related to the tsar in Paris: “I have reviewed the amber cabinet given to Your Majesty by the king of Prussia and decided to keep it in the trunks in which it was delivered (...) There is little, practically no damage. Some very small pieces have fallen off but they can be glued back on, while those which were lost can be filled in. It is a truly remarkable work, the likes of which I have never seen in the whole world.”

The cabinet’s decoration, however, was not fully finished due to the sudden halt in the work process following the death of King Frederick I. For example, some of the pilasters joining the great panneaux were missing, as was the cornice which closed the decor. St Petersburg in turn lacked the amber and the master craftsmen capable of filling in the missing parts. For this reason, the contents of the trunks, including the 8 beautiful sail-size plates (370 x 188 mm) had to remain in the chests unexhibited for many years.

Until the end of his life Peter I did not decide how to use the treasure he had been given. Neither Peter’s wife, Catherine I, who ruled in 1725-1727, nor his son Peter II, who was tsar in 1727-1730, paid any attention to it. It was only when the imperial power passed on to Peter I’s daughter, Tsarina Elisabeth I, that the first attempts were made to use the amber treasure in successive imperial residences in the developing capital by the River Neva. 

The amber decor in the Winter Palace, St Petersburg

The practical use of the amber panels in a fixed interior decor began in 1743. As early as on January 3 of that year, the Tsarina ordered them to be moved to the newly-built Winter Palace (the third) by Francesco B. Rastrelli. At that time, a second Italian master appeared on the scene, who also accompanied the further transformations of the amber cabinet into the Amber Room for many years. His name was Alexander Martelli, a restorer and stuccoist, who worked permanently in St Petersburg for the imperial court. He learned and largely mastered amber working techniques, the principles of fixing large amber structures and developed the recipes for resin and wax binders, similar to those used by the Gdansk masters. Therefore, he was able to permanently stick the details that had fallen off and even fill in some of the small fragments. In a contract signed on February 11, 1743, Martelli also undertook to assemble the entire decor in a designated room at the Winter Palace. Astonishingly, the fee for the entire work amounted to only 600 roubles.

The design of the decor was developed by Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli, who later designed the Amber Room. Rastrelli had to replace the missing pilasters – which were supposed to be the joining element for the decoration and according to Schlüter’s original idea were to be made of pure amber, engraved and sculpted in relief – with mirror pilasters with carved wooden frames due to the lack of craftsmen. He presented his design on this matter to Tsarina Elisabeth herself and got her personal signature. It turned out, though, that no Russian glassworks was capable of making the high-quality mirrors of the large dimensions suitable for the height of the decoration (370 cm). A foreign manufacturer was not to be found immediately, either; after failed attempts in Germany and England, the order was finally fulfilled by a French company recommended by the French woodcarver Michel, who made the frames. This took place in December 1745, i.e. after almost three years from the commencement of the work at the Winter Palace.

Somewhat earlier Elisabeth I received a magnificent gift from Prussian King Frederick II, which also helped to complete the decor. The gift was a fourth amber frame, included in Schlüter’s design, but not made. The building of the frame was kept a secret, so that the Russian sovereign would have a pleasant surprise. The Königsberg masters rejected the design sent from St Petersburg and made a frame in the novel rococo style, according to a design by Anton Reich. The frame was made by the Königsberg masters: Johann Berngard, Friedrich Welpendorf and Jacob Sur. In contrast to the three earlier frames with biblical motifs, the frame from Königsberg depicted Russia’s glory and military might: underneath the imperial crown was a panoply of swords, halberds, guns, cannons and gunpowder barrels.

Since then, the Amber Cabinet at the Winter Palace, the official residence of Russia’s rulers, played a ceremonial role. The last delegation to be received there was a group of Polish and Saxon diplomats, led by Count Funk. The visit took place on January 8, 1755. Several months later (in August 1755), upon the order of Tsarina Elisabeth, the cabinet was dismantled and moved (literally on the backs of a company of soldiers) to Tsarskoye Selo, 25 km away.

The Amber Room in Tsarskoye Selo

Tsarskoye Selo was one of the satellite residences of the imperial House of Romanov surrounding the capital Saint Petersburg. The construction of this enormous palace and park complex began on a scale equal to that of the capital buildings soon after the Russian Empire’s capital was moved to the city by the River Neva. Among the many buildings at Tsarskoye Selo (palaces, manors, a Chinese village, Turkish bath and other exotic facilities) the Great Summer Palace of the Tsars stood out in its scale and importance.

Still unsatisfied with the palace’s designs, Elisabeth I dismissed a number of architects in quick succession, until Rastrelli took on the job at the turn of the 1740s and 50s. He was also the designer of the Palace’s interior, including the Amber Room located in the enfilade on the stately 2^nd floor, close to the largest ballroom in Russia of the time.

The Amber Room in Tsarskoye Selo was much larger than the cabinets in Berlin and St Petersburg. In its horizontal projection, the Room was a square with a 10 metre side, while the 7.8 metre height of the storey was equal to three housing floors today. As can be easily calculated, the total area of the Room’s walls was 312 m², and Rastrelli had only 74 m² worth of amber decor (including the fourth frame from Königsberg), which covered only 23.7% of the total area, to decorate it. In spite of this disproportion he managed to create an impression of the predominance of amber in the Room’s interior.

He managed to achieve this thanks to a number of resolute compositional efforts:

- mirrors reflecting the amber decor placed on the pillars of the outside wall, with three very large windows cutting through them from the floor to the plafond;

- fragments of the side walls along the stretch of enfilade doors decorated with rich, gilded woodcarving compositions;

- the set of eight large plates in the middle section of the walls spaced with doubled mirror pilasters;

- a heavily loaded gilded wooden profile cornice added above the amber section, which consisted of a one-metre-high plinth and 370 cm main panneaux, and with an open-work woodcarved decoration of reliefs and figural sculptures covered with gold flakes;

- an oil-on-canvass imitation of an amber mosaic painted behind the woodcarving decoration, which was intentionally placed very high (5 metres above the floor) and partially obstructed the view of the upper part of the walls to a viewer looking from below. The 30-metre strip, 270 cm wide and running across 3 walls of the Room, was painted by Ivan Bielskiy;

- Rastrelli added impressive high relief supraports gilded with gold flakes above all the doors, which gave an impression that the door openings were made naturally taller, not that there was not enough amber;

- the bases of the mirror pilasters in the plinth, which lacked the amber plates, were decorated with a painted design to imitate amber.

Rastrelli also took care to supplement the decor with new attractive and expensive elements:

- the Room received a floor of many colours made of exotic varieties of wood and a monumental painted scene entitled The Triumph of Wisdom over Pleasure on the plafond;

- the French gilded bronzes (wall lamps and chandeliers) turned out to be an important element of the composition, as they created a lighting system which added to the beauty of the amber.

Already in the spring of 1756, Tsarina Elisabeth was able to admire the Amber Room in all the beauty and splendour that Rastrelli’s talent gave it. However, many details remained to be touched up or even replaced with genuine amber artefacts instead of their painted likenesses.

About 1765, already during the reign of Tsarina Catherine II, the Room accumulated many pieces of furniture and decorative objects made of pure amber or veneered with amber plates. The items collected here included historical chests, altars, passion scenes, chessboards, receptacles, candlesticks and many other objects obtained earlier as gifts or confiscated in regions occupied by the Russian army (including Poland, and especially Gdańsk). The furniture included a large table for 12 with an amber intarsia, made on site in Tsarskoye Selo in the large amber workshop (with up to 200 persons working there) directed by Friedrich Roggenbucke, Königsberg master, and later by his son Johann.

Filling the Room with lots of amber objects, which were repeatedly reflected in the pilaster mirrors, strengthened the impression of the abundance and omnipresence of amber. Unfortunately, no piece of furniture made in Tsarskoye Selo has withstood the test of time: they were all gone by the mid-19^th century. Their makers failed to consider the differences in the shrinkage between wood and amber in the changing temperatures and relative humidity. And the Room was only used from time to time during the Tsar’s visits and only then was it really heated.

The decor of the Amber Room was constantly enriched up to the end of the 18^th century when it became a magnificent collection of art works from the baroque through rococo to classicism. It would be impossible to mention the hundreds of additions made to the decor; however, we should not omit a very special and distinctive gift from Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria: four mosaics of semi-precious stones. These were small pictures – allegories of the 5 senses (touch and smell were on a single piece – the only fragment of the decoration to survive World War II), made in Florence based on paintings on cardboard by Giuseppe Zocchi in a technique called “pietra dura.”

The condition of the Amber Room’s decor deteriorated over the 19^th and early 20^th century. The amber moveables were moved to other rooms in the Palace (which in 1910 was named after Catherine I), and the decor of the walls was to be sent to Gdańsk for thorough conservation at the Moritz Stumpf & Sohn company in 1912. The outbreak of World War I thwarted this plan.

There was no thorough conservation after the Revolution in 1917, with only the elements falling off the plates being glued back on from time to time with various binders. The already empty interior, with the equestrian monument of Frederick II, king of Prussia, in the middle of the Room was left unchanged after the Revolution.

The Amber Room was closed to most visitors and not very many people had a chance to see it, either under the Tsars or in Soviet times.

Only 87 days after the outbreak of the German-Soviet war in 1941, the Wehrmacht managed to reach Tsarskoye Selo and immediately began to strip the walls of the Amber Room of the decorations the Russians had left behind. The German military engineers managed to do this over 36 hours after their entering the Palace, leaving only several dozen chips of the decor behind.

back to: amber history