The Rotunda of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg is a circular hall in the northwest wing of the palace created for Tsar Nicholas I by the architect Auguste de Montferrand. Designed in a circular neoclassical temple style, it served as an anteroom, vestibule and link between the more public state rooms of the palace and the more intimate rooms used by the Imperial family. The room is domed and top lit by an occulus.
The Rotunda was one of the many rooms destroyed by the Winter Palace fire of 1837. It was rebuilt in near-original style, but with the addition of a gallery under the dome.
Today, the Rotunda is an exhibition hall of the State Hermitage Museum.
Famous quotes containing the words winter and/or palace:
“Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious by this son of York;
And all the clouds that loured upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Good places for aphorisms: in fortune cookies, on bumper stickers, and on banners flying over the Palace of Free Advice.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)