Marble Palace

About museum

The Marble Palace is a notable monument of Russian architecture of the second half of the 18th century. It was built to a design by the Italian architect A. Rinaldi at the behest of Empress Catherine II for Count G. G. Orlov in 1768–1785. It received its name due to the extensive use of various types of marble in the decoration of the façades and ceremonial halls. In 1892 the owner became Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich (1858–1915), a Silver Age poet who wrote under the cryptonym K. R. From 1919 to 1936 the palace housed the State Academy of the History of Material Culture, and later the Leningrad branch of the Central Museum of V. I. Lenin. In 1991 the palace was transferred to the State Russian Museum. It houses the permanent exhibition "Collection of St. Petersburg Collectors — the Rzhevsky Brothers", which includes works by artists of the 18th–20th centuries such as I. Aivazovsky, Yu. Klever, I. Dubovsky, I. Mashkov, P. Konchalovsky, and B. Kustodiev.