The Room of Archaeology

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.

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