🖼 General Staff Building (Hermitage)

Дворцовая пл., 6–8

Rossi's semicircular building with an arch on Palace Square; its east wing holds Hermitage exhibition halls under glass roofs.

The building was built in 1819–1829 to a design by Carlo Rossi; until 1917 it housed the Army General Staff, the Foreign Ministry and the Finance Ministry.
The arch is crowned by Victory in a chariot drawn by six horses — the work of the sculptors Stepan Pimenov and Vasily Demut-Malinovsky.
To lighten the chariot, the figures were hammered out of copper over a cast-iron frame — making the sculptural group five times lighter.
On 30 August 1918 the chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, Moisei Uritsky, was killed in the entrance of the east building.
The east wing was transferred to the Hermitage in 1999, and its full reconstruction was finished in 2013.
The wing fully opened on 28 June 2014 with the Manifesta 10 biennial — Matisse's "Dance" and "Music" were moved here at the same time.