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This is the Amber Room, which is part of the formal set of rooms in the Catherine Palace. It was called one of the wonders of the world. The original plans for the Amber Room have been attributed to Andreas Schluter, the chief architect of the Prussian royal court in 1699. During reconstruction of the Great Royal Palace in Berlin commissioned by Frederic I, Andreas Schluter had the idea of using amber, a material never before used for interior decoration, to complete one of the palace rooms. Bringing this idea to fruition was made easier by the fact that the royal stores held the king's large amber collection. Andreas Schluter used three richly decorated amber frames with windows created in the 17th century by German masters as the basis for the décor. The architect invited Gottfried Wolfram, the court amber master of the Danish Kind Fredric IV, from Copenhagen to work on the amber room. In April of 1701, Wolfram arrived in Berlin with a letter of recommendation and started work. The original plans were only half completed since Andreas Schluter was later dismissed and left Berlin.
The next court architect was the Swede Eosander von Goethe. He did not get along very well with the amber master, so Gottfried Wolfram was also dismissed. The king decided to construct the amber study in the Charlottenburg castle, and the completed amber fragments were sent there. In 1707, the agreement for the continuation of work was concluded with two masters invited from Danzig-Gottfried Turau and Ernest Schacht. This stage in the creation of the amber room lasted almost five years. In 1713 after the death of Fredric I, work was halted. The new Prussian King Fredric Wilhelm I had no need for an amber room. All of the amber architectural details were taken to the Berlin Zeighaus and forgotten. Word of the unusual amber study reached Russia. Czar Peter I decided to obtain the Amber Study for his Kunstkamera collection. In 1716, on the way to France, he met with Friedrich Wilhelm I in Habelbern, not far from Berlin. Soon Czar Peter I received the amber room as a diplomatic gift, along with the "Liburnica" yacht. Two years later, the Tsar returned the gesture with a gift of 55 grenadiers and a cup of his own design. The shipping of the amber room was directed by the Russian representative at the Prussian court, Count Alexei Golovin. Eighteen boxes of amber were loaded into eight carts and sent first to Koenigsberg, then to Memel, and spent 6 weeks in transit.
On the 6th of January, 1717, at the orders of czar Peter I, P.M. Bestuzhev-Rumin, uber-hofmeister of the Duchess of Curland, Anna Ivanovna, met the shipment in Memel and sent it to Riga, from whence it travelled to St. Petersburg. St. Petersburg General Governor Alexander Menshikov accepted and unpacked the boxes according to the instructions from Berlin. At that time they did not manage to reconstruct the Amber Study, and the amber was taken to a wing of the Summer Palace. When she came to the throne, Empress Elizabeth decided to use the forgotten Amber Room to complete one of the rooms in her official residence, the new, third Winter Palace, and commissioned her chief architect, Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli, with this task. In 1743, the Italian master Alexander Martelli was invited to Russia to repair and correct details of the amber pieces. There were not enough pieces of amber to decorate the room in the Winter Palace, so Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli used mirrored pilasters and painted additional panels in "faux amber." In 1745, Fredric II gave Empress Elizabeth a fourth frame executed according to designs by Anton Reich. Its decorations employed allegories flattering to the Empress. The Amber Room, pieced together in 1746, served for official receptions, although during palace reconstruction it was moved from one room to another.
In July of 1755, Empress Elizabeth commissioned Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli with creating a new Amber Room in the Great (Catherine) Palace. V. Fermor, head of the chancellery of the Imperial Study, was tasked with carefully dismantling the room in the Winter Palace and packing it in boxes. A special team was sent from Tsarskoe Selo to bear the crates by hand from the St. Petersburg Winter Palace to Tsarskoe Selo. The room in the Catherine Palace measured 96 square meters, and was too large for the Amber Study. Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli reassembled the parts of the study by placing the second-tier panels symmetrically on three walls, breaking them up with pilasters and mirrors, and also adorning the room with carved, gilded sculptures. A. Martelli was again invited to install the panels. In places where there was not enough amber, the walls were covered in canvas and painted in "fake amber" by the artist Ivan Belsky. Considering the fragility of the material and the fact that pieces could crack and fall, a special caretaker was appointed for the Amber Room to maintain the amber. In 1758, one Fredric Roggenbuch was invited from Prussia to perform this task. He also headed the Tsarskoe Selo amber workshop.
In 1763, Empress Catherine II ordered the painted panels replaced with real amber panels, and that panels be manufactured for the lower tier. Fredric Roggenbuch was assisted by masters who had previously been invited to Russia: Clemence Fride, Johann Gottlieb Welpendorf, apprentices Heinrich Wilhelm Fride, Friedrich Roggenbuch's son Johann, and their Russian students. Eight flat panels with an inlaid design were produced for the lower tier, including eight fake pilaster panels, supraportas for the central door, and carved accents on the cornice using fragments of the Prussian work. Over the course of 4 years, 450 kilograms of amber went into the project. By 1770 the Amber Room was complete. The room now attained the state in which it appears in old photographs. The amber, which covered three walls, was arranged in three tiers. The central (middle) tier consisted of eight large, symmetrical vertical panels. Four of them contained pictures made of precious stones executed in the 1750s in Florence using the Florentine mosaic technique according to designs by the artist Giuseppe Dzokki, and depicting five senses: Sight, Taste, Sound, Touch and Smell. The distance between the large panels was occupied by mirrored pilasters. The lower tier of the room was covered in square amber panels. The south-western corner contained a small amber table on an elegantly turned leg. The room's furnishings consisted of inlaid wood commodes of Russian origin, and a vase of Chinese porcelain. In addition, one of the most valuable collections of amber objects created in the 17th and 18th centuries by German, Polish and Petersburg masters was housed in the room's glass-covered display cases. Abrupt temperature changes and stove heating damaged the amber.
During the 19th century, the room was restored three times: in 1833, 1865, and between 1893 and 1897. During the 1920s and 1930s, minor repairs were performed by I. V. Krestovsky. Major restoration was scheduled for 1941. During the first days of World War II, when the evacuation of the museum's treasures from the Catherine Palace was already underway, due to the fragility of the Amber Room, it was decided not to send them further behind the lines, but rather to preserve them on the spot without taking them down from the walls. The panels were first glued over with paper, then covered in gauze and cotton. The German troops invading the town of Pushkin (Tsarskoe Selo) brought with them specialists from the Kunstkommission. The occupants dismantled the panels and sent them to Koenigsberg. Number 200 of the Koenigsberg gift record notes that the room was bequeathed to the museum by the German State Directorate for Palaces and Parks. The stolen amber panels and doors were displayed in one of the halls on the third floor of the Koenigsberg Palace. The museum's director, Alfred Rode, wrote in 1944 that the Amber Room, now returned to its homeland, was the best exhibit in the Koenigsberg Museum. This was the last place where the Amber Room was shown. In 1944, when the Germans retreated, the amber was again dismantled, packed into crates and taken in an unknown direction. Since then the room has been lost. Search efforts have so far been unsuccessful.
In 1983, serious work on recreating the Amber Room was undertaken in the Catherine Palace. The architect Alexander Kedrinsky authored the project. In 1996, B. P. Igdalov, director of the "Amber Room Co." (this is how the amber workshop at the Catherine Palace is known) recreated the Florentine mosaic "Sight." Work continues on the second mosaic "Touch and Smell." The Amber Room was opened for visitors in 1980 as one of five halls from Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli 's Formal Enfilade in the Catherine Palace. At that time the ceiling mural was painted, and the upper tier of panels was painted to resemble amber. The inlaid floors were also recreated. Those parts occupied by the amber panels were covered in canvas. The amber panels of the lower tier and the corner table were recreated in 1994. The first of eight large (3.6x1.34 meter) panels were put in place in the Amber Room in 1997. Two of the four narrow panels are nearing completion.
