The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg as a royal collection and cultural treasury reveals the aesthetic preferences of a nation that has always stood on the cultural and geographical periphery of Europe. Initially an imperial collection under Peter I, patrons of the Hermitage focused attention on collecting canonical European paintings and also emulating Western models of display. In this way, the Russian aristocracy superimposed itself on Europe's culture through the construction of a collection to rival its great European contemporaries. / The development of a standardized practice of display has widely been studied in relation to Western museums but similar attention has not been extended to the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. I argue that Nicholas was able to use objects of art and strategies of display to assert a greater role in the European state system of the mid-nineteenth century. While the supposed transparency conveyed by the collection's public opening was meant to make Russia seem less threatening to Western powers, in reality the yolk of autocracy was as tight as ever.

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