Arts Square

This guide to Arts Square in Saint Petersburg opens in a fourth-floor apartment overlooking the square, where the painter Isaak Brodsky, once Ilya Repin's favorite student, filled his rooms floor to ceiling with the work of nearly every major Russian artist he could find. You'll hear how the state turned his home into a museum after his death, and meet the architect Carlo Rossi, who shaped the square itself around the Mikhailovsky Palace. A workshop one floor above Brodsky's rooms, once an aristocratic music salon, still hosts chamber concerts today.