Kunstkamera

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View of the Kunstkammer across the Neva.

The Kunstkammer or Kunstkamera was the first museum in Russia. It was established by Peter the Great on the Neva Riverfront facing the Winter Palace. The turreted Petrine Baroque building of the Kunstkamera was completed by 1727.

Peter's museum was dedicated to preserving "natural and human curiosities and rarities". The tsar's personal collection, originally stored in the Summer Palace, features a large assortment of human and animal fetuses with anatomical deficiencies, which Peter had seen in 1697 visiting Frederick Ruysch and Levinus Vincent. Some of the most gruesome exhibits are the heads of Catherine I's lover Willem Mons and his sister Anna Mons, still preserved in alcohol.

In 1716 Peter established the mineral cabinet of Kunstkamera, depositing there a collection of 1195 minerals which he had bought from Gotvald, a Danzig (Gdańsk) doctor. The collection was enriched with Russian minerals. It was a predecessor of the Fersman Mineralogical Museum, now based in Moscow.

Many items were bought in Amsterdam from pharmacologist Albertus Seba and anatomist Frederik Ruysch and formed the basis for the Academy of Sciences. Head-physician to the czar, Robert Arskine, and his secretary Johann Daniel Schumacher were reponsible for the acquisition. The Kunstkammer opened for public view in 1719.

In the 1830s, the Kunstkamera collections were dispersed to newly established imperial museums, the most important being the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, established in 1879, with a collection approaching 2,000,000 items. The museum is still housed in the Kunstkamera and bears the name of Peter the Great since 1903.