The Room of Ancient Sculpture

The architecture of this room uses the motif of a Greek peristyle (inner courtyard) surrounded by a colonnade on all sides. An ancient house, presenting blank walls to the street, would be open to this inner sun-filled garden. Here children would play amid the greenery, while adults enjoyed the coolness and the gentle murmur of water. The room is used to display a statue of Heracles with the golden apples of the Hesperides; a statue of Bacchus, the god of wine that at one time adorned the Grotto by the pond in the Catherine Park at Tsarskoye Selo; and also sculptural depictions of sileni and satyrs. In the depths of the room there are Roman portraits. It is known that Klenze designed this room for the statue of Aphrodite - the Taurida Venus - acquired by Peter the Great. The goddess of love was supposed to stand in the centre of the room, surrounded by a light colonnade - in roughly the same way as, according to old tradition, its creator Praxiteles placed it in the Temple of Aphrodite in the Anatolian city of Cnidus in the 4th century B.C.

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