Arts Square
Elegant square ringed by a palace-turned-museum, a theatre, a philharmonic hall, and an artist's preserved apartment.
Location
About this audio guide
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.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
The State Russian Museum, Mikhailovsky Palace
Neoclassical palace where salons hosted poets and composers, now home to centuries of national art.
Dostoevsky Museum
Restored writer's apartment where a literary giant wrote his final novel and drew his last breath.
Yelaginoostrovskiy Dvorets-Muzey
Neoclassical island palace with marble interiors, built by Carlo Rossi for a dowager empress.
State Hermitage Museum
Vast imperial palace museum housing millions of artworks, from Rembrandt to Da Vinci, along the Neva River.
Mikhailovsky Theatre
Nineteenth-century opera and ballet house with silver, velvet and crystal interiors on a grand arts square.
Alexandrinsky Theatre
Empire-style Imperial theatre by Carlo Rossi, site of Russia's most infamous stage premiere.