General Staff Building (Saint Petersburg) in the context of "Stepan Pimenov"

The State Hermitage Museum (Russian: Государственный Эрмитаж, romanized: Gosudarstvennyj Ermitaž, IPA: [ɡəsʊˈdarstvʲɪn(ː)ɨj ɪrmʲɪˈtaʂ]) is a museum of art and culture in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and holds the largest collection of paintings in the world. It was founded in 1764 when Empress Catherine the Great acquired a collection of paintings from the Berlin merchant Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky. The museum celebrates the anniversary of its founding each year on 7 December, Saint Catherine's Day. It has been open to the public since 1852. The Art Newspaper ranked the museum 10th in their list of the most visited art museums, with 2,812,913 visitors in 2022.

Its collections, of which only a small part is on permanent display, comprise over three million items (the numismatic collection accounting for about one-third of them). The collections occupy a large complex of six historic buildings along Palace Embankment, including the Winter Palace, a former residence of Russian emperors. Apart from them, the Menshikov Palace, Museum of Porcelain, Storage Facility at Staraya Derevnya, and the eastern wing of the General Staff Building are also part of the museum. The museum has several exhibition centers abroad. The Hermitage is a federal state property. Since July 1992, the director of the museum has been Mikhail Piotrovsky.

Palace Square (Russian: Дворцо́вая пло́щадь, romanized: Dvortsovaya Ploshchad, IPA: [dvɐrˈtsovəjə ˈploɕːɪtʲ]), connecting Nevsky Prospekt with Palace Bridge leading to Vasilievsky Island, is the central city square of St Petersburg and of the former Russian Empire. Many significant events took place there, including the Bloody Sunday massacre and parts of the October Revolution of 1917. Between 1918 and 1944, it was known as Uritsky Square (Russian: площадь Урицкого), in memory of the assassinated leader of the city's Cheka branch, Moisei Uritsky.

The earliest and most celebrated building on the square, the Baroque white-and-turquoise Winter Palace (as re-built between 1754 and 1762) of the Russian tsars, gives the square its name. Although the adjacent buildings are designed in the Neoclassical style, they perfectly match the palace in their scale, rhythm, and monumentality.The opposite, southern side of the square was designed in the shape of an arc by George von Velten in the late 18th century. These plans came to fruition half a century later, when Alexander I of Russia (reigned 1801–1825) envisaged the square as a vast monument to the 1812–1814 Russian victories over Napoleon and commissioned Carlo Rossi to design the bow-shaped Empire-style Building of the General Staff (1819–1829), which centers on a double triumphal arch crowned with a Roman quadriga.