The thing about a palace is that it is designed to be overwhelming. It’s a thing. If you want my opinion, building an art gallery beats the heck out of building an army…but there it is. Today, I’m going to talk about a couple of floor details.
In the room below, there is one of the highlights of the collection – an enormous gold peacock clock. On the other side of that room, as you can see below, are some pretty impressive chandeliers (6 of them, in fact) a beautiful roof top garden, and a floor. The floor is what caught my eye. Let’s have a look.
The room with a floor, a peacock, and a view
The floor has 8 panels, and each one has a garland of fruit and flowers…
…and each of the flowers has a lot of petals that are miraculously cut by some kind of angel-magician.
Below the garlands are scenes of sea creatures (did I mention that I have a thing about water?)…
Apparently the same angel-magician was at work here. While you are at it – check out the shading in the border detail. Seriously impressive.
The Hermitage is so big that they have to number the rooms so you don’t get lost. There are hundreds of rooms. At least half of them have some kind of magic like this going on.
I added some of the hardwood floors to prove I am not making this up – and a doorknob at the end for good measure. Remember. Hundreds of rooms. Plus the paintings.
You see why my feet are sore? It’s like a great book. Very hard to put down!
