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Among the most important private art collections ever created were those of Imperial Russia. Catherine the Great, guided by Voltaire, amassed treasures on a Herculean scale, laying the basis for what is today the Russian State Hermitage. Favorite courtiers built palaces of unprecedented magnificence in St. Petersburg and Moscow for their vast collections of paintings, antiquities, and decorative arts. In a lively and anecdotal text, Oleg Neverov reassembles these now-legendary private collections-which, after the 1917 Revolution, were dispersed among the Hermitage, Pushkin, and Tretiakov museums, sold to foreign museums, or spirited abroad.
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