The Atlantes

At the main southern façade of the New Hermitage, facing Millionnaya Street, stands a covered portico gallery supported by ten colossal figures of Atlantes. Until the mid-1920s, this was the entrance through which visitors entered the museum, and the sculptures themselves have long since become one of the recognisable symbols of St Petersburg — they were even the subject of a song by Alexander Gorodnitsky.

The idea of decorating the entrance with Atlantes was proposed by the designer of the New Hermitage, the Munich architect Leo von Klenze. In 1843 he offered the commission overseeing the restoration of the Winter Palace two options for the portico's decoration — female caryatids or male atlantes — and the second was chosen. The model was the stone giants of the ancient temple of Olympian Zeus that once stood in the Sicilian city of Akragas. A scaled-down model of an atlas was first made to Klenze's sketches by the Munich sculptor Johann Halbig, but in 1846 the St Petersburg master Alexander Terebenev created his own full-scale version, which was the one adopted for execution; the architect Vasily Stasov insisted that the granite be polished to a high gloss.

The figures were carved from grey Serdobol granite, quarried near Serdobol — present-day Sortavala in Karelia. Terebenev led a team of roughly a hundred and fifty stonemasons: each worked on a separate part of the body, while the sculptor himself personally carved the faces of all ten figures. The Atlantes were placed on their rapakivi granite pedestals by 1 September 1848; each figure stands about five metres tall. The pylons, frieze and balcony colonnettes are made of a different stone — pale limestone mixed with marble from a quarry near Kirna — though during a restoration in 2000 it was mistakenly painted over to look like ordinary plaster.

For this work Terebenev received the title of academician and a diamond ring from Nicholas I, yet the master's own fate was a sad one: despite generous fees, he lived beyond his means and died in 1859 in poverty and almost entirely alone. The portico, too, endured hard trials: in December 1941, during the Siege of Leningrad, an artillery shell struck it, leaving a jagged wound on the torso of one of the statues that is still visible today. Since the late 19th century the building has also suffered from uneven settling of its foundation, causing new cracks to appear on the sculptures from time to time.

A 1997 survey using highly sensitive sensors showed that the portico is rigidly connected to the main building and settles along with it, with the resulting load passing through the heads and arms of the Atlantes, which were never originally intended to be a load-bearing element of the structure. Specialists recommended altering the fastenings, but no practical work on this project has been carried out to date.

Today the Atlantes remain one of the most photographed details of the Hermitage and a calling card of the city on a par with its raised bridges. Despite the engineering difficulties, the sculptures continue to serve their decorative purpose and stand as a reminder of the skill of the mid-19th-century Russian stonemasons who translated a European architect's vision into granite.