If you want to get away from the crowds and the lines of the Hermitage but still see some of the most fantastic art St. Petersburg has to offer, the Russian Academy of Fine Arts Museum located on the scenic Universitetskaya Embankment is where you ought to head next.
The Russian Academy of Fine Arts Museum is a unique art collection not only in Russia, but throughout the world. Here you will find drawings, engravings, paintings of Russian and West European masters, as well as casts of antique and West European sculptures which till this day serve as models for drawing in classes of “plaster heads” and “plaster figures”. So don’t be surprised if you see Academy students drawing away in front a centuries old statue.
People come here to appreciate the work of artists and sculptors of various schools and eras — in a professional way or out through idle curiosity. On the first floor of the Academy Museum there are sculptures — about 600 monuments from the 3rd millennium BC until the second half of the XVIII century. The second floor holds the paintings of European schools' artists of the XV-XIX centuries and paintings of famous Russian artists: Kramskoy, Chistyakov, Repin, Kiprensky, Kustodiev, Roerich, Myasoedov, Ryabushkin and others. On the third floor of the Academy there is a real St. Petersburg in miniature, a unique collection of architectural models of St. Isaac's Cathedral, Smolny Monastery, Mikhailovsky Castle and other famous buildings.
The building of the Academy of Arts itself (built in 1764-1772 according to the design of Kokorinov and de la Mothe, two teachers of the Academy of Arts architecture class) represents an outstanding architectural monument of early Russian Classicism. Russian painters and sculptors of the 18th and 19th centuries were in charge of the ceremonial interiors. The Academy’s House Church, Raphael and Titian halls were decorated in the 1830’s after the design of Ton, the visionary behind the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow and also the rector of the Academy of Arts in the 1840’s and 1850’s.
Apart from the permanent collection, the Academy also hosts a number of temporary exhibitions of Russian and foreign artists each year.