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Round Tower.
The third print in the Prisons series
Giovanni Battista Piranesio
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The Antiquities
of Cimmerian Bosporus Kept in the Imperial Hermitage Museum
St Petersburg,1854, Vols. 1-3
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This
semicircular room with pale green walls and columns of red Finnish
granite is decorated by bronze statuettes of European manufacture
and cut stone ornaments produced by Urals craftsmen that are arrayed
on the bookcases. The room housed a rich collection of books on archaeology
(about 5,500 volumes) containing much information about the history
of the Ancient World. A special feature of the archaeological library
is the fine selection of presentation copies that were never on sale
anywhere. These include a magnificent publication of the Duke of Marlborough's
Grand Cabinet of gemstones and a complete publication of the collection
of Giovanni-Battista Piranesi, an outstanding European engraver, archaeologist
and restorer, whom contemporaries dubbed "the Rembrandt of ancient
ruins". A major achievement of Russian archaeology is the monumental
Antiquities of Cimmerian
Bosporus (St Petersburg, 1854) that records the celebrated finds
made on the northern shores of the Black Sea in the first half of
the 19th century. |
