Reconstruction of the Lost Amber Room

Wieslaw Gierlowski

The original historical decor of the walls of the Amber Room in Catherine Palace at the Tsarskoye Selo palace and park complex, stolen on September 17, 1941 by German engineers from the 552nd Wehrmacht Regiment, was lost without a trace at the end of World War II.

The mysterious disappearance of the original

The Germans exhibited the stolen work for only a short time in one of the rooms of Königsberg Castle, but after the allied air raids of 1944, they packed the entire amber decor together with its crystal pilasters, gilded bronzes and woodcarvings into enormous trunks and hid them in the deep castle basements. In mid-October 1944, over a dozen trucks took the treasure in the direction of the port of Pilau, but failed to reach their destination. The work of artists and craftsmen from all over Europe could not have been destroyed, because this would have left clear traces. It amounted to several tonnes of amber, glass, wood and metal. So it must have been hidden in a very sophisticated way.

The intelligence services of the Allied Countries and Germany itself have looked for the Amber Room for decades, so far, to no avail. Only parts of three stone mosaics depicting The Allegory of the Senses were found in Königsberg, toasted during the fire of the Castle and thus discoloured. As luck would have it, the fourth part was stolen earlier by one of the German military engineers in Tsarkoye Selo, to be discovered in 2002 in Potsdam. Over a thousand books were written and over a dozen films were made about the search for the lost Amber Room, which, alas, still remain fruitless.

The decision on reconstruction

As early as in the late 1970s, the Soviet authorities came to the conclusion that in spite of intense search carried out by such services as the KGB and the GRU, there was no hope to find the work. Therefore, the government of the Russian Federal Soviet Republic was instructed to consider the possibility of reconstructing the Amber Room’s decor and placing it in situ at Catherine Palace, which had been reconstructed after wartime damage, so to speak in contrast to the general principle not to make copies of historical monuments expressed in the Venice Charter and in other international conventions. The decision to begin reconstruction was taken by the government of the Russian Federal Socialist Soviet Republic (RFSSR) in April 1979, after considering the following circumstances: access to the raw amber resources from the largest amber mine in the world in the Yantarny settlement in the Kaliningrad Oblast, the experience of the still thriving Russian school of glyptics in Leningrad and the possibility of the creative transfer of its experience to the working of amber and training of specialists in amber techniques and art from the time of its heyday at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries at the Sculpture Faculty at the Mukhina Academy of Arts and Design in Leningrad.

The task of determining the reconstruction principles for the lost decor of the Amber Room was entrusted to a scientific commission of representatives of many institutes from geology, through various technology departments, to history and art theory. From the beginning, there was a sharp divide in the commission, with those in favour of recreating the work in a new condition, from natural amber not subject to artificial ageing processes on one side, and those in favour of giving the work an appearance identical with the condition documented by photographs from the 1930s when the monument already had reddish patina brought by its 220 years of existence - on the other. The concept to produce artificial patina won. Led by Prof. Sviatoslav Savkevich, the representatives of the natural sciences refused to perform further work in the commission in protest.

The development of the reconstruction design was entrusted to Alexander A. Kedrinsky, the Chief Architect of the Tsarskoye Selo complex. This was an extremely difficult task, because preliminary research in Russian and foreign archives showed that there were no inventory drawings of the decor left nor any paintings which depicted the Room’s pre-World War II appearance. Only a mid-19th century colourful water colour by P. Grekhnev depicts a small detail of the plinth with the monogram of King Frederick I. As it happened, the colours of the painting gave a false picture.
Eighty-six photographs of various fragments of the Room’s decor have survived, including only one colour slide from 1937. It was necessary to invent a special method of recreating the colour nuances on the basis of black and white photographs. The 76 details of the Room’s original decor found in the rubble of Königsberg Castle turned out to be very helpful in the recreation of the correct colour scheme. Even more helpful was the discovery of Gottfried Turau’s signature between two layers of a bottom of a coffer which used to be part of the Room’s furniture. The same time of origin, the same craftsman and type of ambe together made for invaluable comparative material.

We can assume that thanks to the meticulous use of iconographic material and the careful study of the extant furniture of the Amber Room and the comprehensive scientific analysis of the reconstruction design, the appearance of the decor on the eve of its theft in 1941 was recreated correctly.

Technical and artistic experience

Coinciding with the design work were experiments in mastering the craft techniques and styles typical of artistic amber craft from the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries.

The team of craftspeople, working initially in the Rosmonumientisskustvo (Russian Monumental Art) state enterprise, and later the Restavrator (Restorer) enterprise, was led by graduates from the Sculpture Faculty at the Mukhina Academy of Arts and Design in Leningrad: Alexander Zhuravlov, the artistic and technical director of the entire team (also a chemistry engineer); Alexander Krilov, the present curator of the Amber Room; and Albert Vanin, talented sculptor and restorer. The team continued to grow gradually (to as much as 75 persons) and after the fall of the Soviet Union it became independent, taking the form of the Tsarskosielskaya Yantarnaya Mastierskaya (Tsarskoye Selo Amber Workshop) limited liability company.

After initially becoming familiar with the amber working techniques in the state-owned factories in Yantarny, Russia and Ribnitz-Damgarten, East Germany, as well as in the workshops of Polish craftsmen, the team first took up work on the thorough conservation of the historical artefacts from the collections of Catherine Palace and the Armoury of the Moscow Kremlin. Following several years of experience, the team began to take orders for the restoration of amber artefacts from other countries (chiefly from Germany).

Within the first 6 years of conservation work, the Tsarskoye Selo team managed (with the support of scientific centres) to master the styles of the works from the time of the origin of the Amber Room’s decor, the old sculpting techniques and the methods of fitting large, many-piece objects, including the binders used to join the details.

The problem of the binder (glue) was one of the most important issues concerning the planned reconstruction of the large panneaux from the middle section of the walls. The amber mosaic plates and amber shaped to make frames, cartouches, medallions, panoplies and other parts of the 370 x 188 cm composition could not be simply glued straight on to the plywood ground board due to differences in their reaction to temperature and humidity changes. Just as 300 years ago, they were joined only with each other and with the gilded metal foil of the ground.

With the aid of the Criminology Institute, binder samples were taken from the extant chips of the Room’s original decor, which – as it turned out – 300 years after its original use easily liquefies at a temperature of +62oC and binds perfectly well after cooling. The binder was a mixture of beeswax and dammar resin, commonly used by the Gdańsk masters at the end of the 17th century. This binder had the advantage over modern synthetic resins in that it was reversible (it is enough to blow a stream of hot air onto the binder) and did not penetrate the amber’s bubbly structure.

After 1984 the problem of the colouring of finished amber elements was solved successfully. The collaboration between Alexander Zhuravlov, the director of the reconstruction team, and the Leningrad Institute of Technology led to the development of a method where a thin layer underneath the polished surface of the amber shapes and plates is saturated with a colouring substance. The colour does not disappear when polished repeatedly and makes it possible to obtain an unlimited range of colours. This method of amber tinting, albeit frowned upon by gemmologists, is very much desired in decorative arts. It protects the products against weathering and stabilises the colour for a very long time. The team received two patents for this tinting method (USSR Register Nos. 1329058 and 1391174).

Having mastered diverse methods of amber working, the binders and the tinting method, the Tsarskoye Selo Amber Workshop began the reconstruction work. They started by copying rather small historical decorative objects, then went on to copy scientifically documented lost works. Most of these works were commissioned by the Amber Museum in Kaliningrad, which had nothing of the pre-World War II Königsberg collection. These objects were identical in shape to their historical counterparts, but different in size (usually ca. 20% larger). A reconstruction of one of the large panneaux of the Amber Room’s walls in a reduced size of 1:5 was also made for this museum.

Having gained this experience, the team began the full-size reconstruction of the Room’s decor. It began with the reconstruction of parts of the plinth as they were much smaller (87 cm high) than the middle parts of the walls (370 cm high). The reconstruction of the elements of the plinth, whose original was largely made of naturally transparent amber collected for centuries in Lochstädt Castle, obtained from the sea and from secondary Quaternary deposits, had to be now made from mined amber, where completely transparent varieties are very rare. This caused the need to use autoclave-toasting technology and the pressing of well-purified fine amber gains with the addition of appropriate tinting pigments.

The transparent parts of the Room’s reconstructed decor have an area of 510 dcm2, 80 dcm2 of which are parts made of artificially clarified nuggets, while 430 dcm2 are of high quality pressed amber. One example of the use of pressed amber are the distinctive details of the plinth: the intaglio sculpted Prussian eagle with King Frederick the First’s number. In the entire composition there is a predominance of opaque details made of natural amber, tinted only on the surface using a method compliant with the patents referred to above. Their area is 8,102 dcm2, while the entire decoration is over 86 m2.

Over the 24 years of preparatory and reconstruction work, the team of talented sculptors and restorers not only completed an enormous and difficult task, but also mastered various specialist methods, not only for amber itself. Magnificent woodcarved frames were created, covered in gold flakes, a colourful floor made of exotic varieties of wood and a painted ornament of the plafond and the upper parts of the walls.

One of the unique and distinctive features of the reconstructed Room were the Florentine semi-precious stone mosaics with allegories of the senses based on paintings on cardboard by Giuseppe Zocchi. Their reconstruction was performed by a group of specialists led by Boris Igdalov, who was appreciated by his team mates when the workshop was transformed into a limited liability company following the collapse of the Soviet Union. He has been the company’s president ever since 1990.

The reconstruction was not only a complicated but also a very cost intensive task. It is estimated that the expenses incurred by Russia (both Soviet Russia and the Federation) were the equivalent of about 12 million dollars. The reconstruction’s completion in time for the 2003 tercentenary of Saint Petersburg’s foundation was possible thanks to the financial support of the Ruhrgas joint-stock company to the amount of 3.5 million dollars.

The ceremonial opening of the reconstructed Amber Room (May 31, 2003) was attended by delegations from 60 countries, mostly heads of state or prime ministers. The opening was accompanied by a scientific session on Amber in Decorative Art. The Room still remains a constant hit with visitors.