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The sky was a steely grey over St Petersburg on Tuesday morning. In a light breeze, the white, red and blue Russian tricolour stirred lazily above the Winter Palace, home of the Hermitage, one of the great museums of the world. In the square outside, pedestrians in thick overcoats passed this way and that, with an air of authentic Russian gloom. At 10.56 GMT a van appeared from the building and drove off to the right. Later, another van, coloured bright orange, drove across the square from right to left. No one looked likely to storm the Winter Palace.
I am able to bring you this blow-by-blow commentary thanks to a live video link from a camera overlooking the palace to a screen at Somerset House in London. It is the first thing you see at the entrance to the Hermitage Rooms, the museum's new London out- station. Amid the palatial grandeur of Tate Modern, this pointless but oddly hypnotic display would no doubt qualify as an "installation". In the less pretentious surroundings provided by the paintings, sculpture, furniture, porcelain, gold, silver, intaglios, cameos and gems collected by Catherine the Great, Autocrat of all the Russias, it is merely a gimmick.
Less pretentious surroundings? In an odd way, yes. The surprising thing about Treasures of Catherine the Great, the opening exhibition at the Hermitage Rooms, is its air of domestic intimacy.
For there was no side about Catherine, for all her grandeur. A teenage German princess packed off to St Petersburg for a dynastic marriage, she fervently embraced Russia and the Orthodox Church. So when, in 1762, her...