Kunstkamera

The Kunstkamera, officially the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences, is Russia's first public museum, founded by Peter the Great in 1714. Its name comes from the German Kunstkammer, "cabinet of art" or "cabinet of curiosities" — collections of this kind were common at European courts in the 16th and 17th centuries, and Peter the Great became acquainted with them during his travels through Europe on the "Grand Embassy" of 1697–1698. The core of the collection consisted of books, instruments, tools and natural curiosities that the tsar deliberately purchased and gathered; the impetus for building a separate structure was the acquisition in 1713 of the enormous Gottorp Globe-Planetarium. The museum's holdings were further enriched by the famous anatomical and zoological collections of the Dutch scholars Frederik Ruysch and Albertus Seba, including the widely known collection of anatomical anomalies and curiosities.

The Kunstkamera building, a monument of Petrine Baroque architecture, was erected on the Spit of Vasilyevsky Island from 1718 to 1734; the building's tower is crowned by an armillary sphere, a symbol of astronomy. In 1747 a major fire destroyed the upper part of the tower along with part of the collections, including valuable manuscripts, though the Gottorp Globe was saved. Russia's first native academician, Mikhail Lomonosov, worked here, and for a long time the Kunstkamera served as the center of activity of the newly founded Academy of Sciences.

As the collections grew, in the 1830s they were divided among several specialized museums — Anatomical, Zoological, Botanical, Mineralogical and Ethnographic. In 1879 the last two of these were combined into the museum's present-day structure, the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, whose holdings were later enriched with material from the expeditions of James Cook, Ivan Kruzenshtern, Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay and other explorers. Today the Kunstkamera preserves a unique collection of objects revealing the history and everyday life of the peoples of the world and remains one of the symbols of Russian science and enlightenment, its multi-faceted tower a familiar landmark on the skyline along the Neva.