TheAmberRoom.doc

学英语报社http://www.e-l- 全新课标理念，优质课程资源
The Amber Room: History of the Creation
The history of the Amber Room dates back to the very beginning of the 18th century, when Andreas Schluter, the chief architect of the Prussian royal court, had the idea of using amber, a material never before used for interior decoration, to complete one of the rooms of the Great Royal Palace in Berlin during the reconstruction under Frederick I. The works started in 1701 and continued until 1713 with the help of the best German, Swedish, and Dutch amber masters, when the old king died and the new Prussian King - Frederick Wilhelm I - came into power. He was not interested in the beautiful and exquisite Amber Room, the rumors of which have by that time reached Russia. 
In 1716, Russian Tsar Peter I visited Berlin, admired the amber masterpiece, and Frederick Wilhelm I asked Peter the Great to accept the unusual room as a diplomatic gift. The Russian Tsar's return present was no less original: 55 choice grenadiers. After a long shipping time and complex route (Berlin-Koenigsburg-Memel-Riga-St.Petersburg) the Amber Room finally reached its destination. The boxes were unpacked but the Russian masters did not manage to reconstruct the Amber Room, and it was for some time forgotten. 
When Empress Elizabeth started reigning in the 1740s, she commissioned her chief architect, Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli, to use the amber for decoration of one of the rooms of the Winter Palace. The room was too large, and the architect used mirrored pilasters and painted additional panels in "fake amber". In 1755, the Amber Room was transferred to the Catherine Palace in Tsarskoje Selo where the new room was to be constructed. The room in the Palace was again too large for the Amber Study, and the amber parts were reassembled on the walls alternating with pilasters and mirrors. The places where the amber was missing, were painted in "fake amber" and afterwards replaced with real amber panels. By 1770 the Amber Room was complete. However the amber was damaged by the stove heating and temperature changes, and the room was restored three times: in 1833, 1865, and in the 1890s. The next restoration was to take place in 1941.
In the beginning of WWII it was decided not to evacuate the fragile Amber Room, and instead preserve the treasures on the walls of the Palace disguised by the paper, gauze and cotton. But is it possible to hide several tons of amber under the paper??? The German troops dismantled the panels and sent them to Koenigsburg, where the Room was displayed in one of the halls of the Koenigsburg Museum. In 1944, as the German Army retired, the Amber Room was dismantled again, and taken into the unknown direction. According to different resources, the Amber Room was:
- destroyed by the Allies' bombing,
- buried in a silver mine not far from Berlin,
- hidden on the shores of the Baltic Sea.
 Nothing is found yet, though parts of the mosaics appeared in the 1990s in Germany. Thus, the 50-year-old mystery of Amber Room is still alive.
Amber Room, Lost to War, Is Recreated
PUSHKIN, Russia -- We have few advantages over the German craftsman who built the original Amber Room," says Alexander Krylov, a 46-year-old Russian master amber craftsman whose long-bearded face could be an image from a Russian icon. "The cutting machines are electrically powered, but still, about 60 percent of the work is done by hand."
Mr. Krylov, an architect by education, has spent the last 20 years resurrecting a whole school of ancient craftsmanship, whose skills had been long forgotten, to rebuild the Amber Room, an early 18th-century masterpiece lost during World War II, on its original site here.
Created by German craftsmen for the Prussian king's palace near Berlin, the unfinished Amber Room was given to the visiting Russian czar, Peter the Great, in 1716, by the king's son and heir, Frederick William I, who was more interested in his army than art and more than happy to be rid of the treasure.
Russian craftsmen, under German supervision, eventually completed the Amber Room and, in the mid-18th century, installed it in the lavish Yekaterinsky Palace in Tsarskoe Selo, just outside St. Petersburg, where it was used to entertain guests to the czarist court.
Not a whole room per se, the Amber Room was a series of large wall panels covering an area a little more than 10 yards square and inlaid with several tons of masterfully carved high-quality amber, long wall mirrors and four Florentine mosaics made of semiprecious stones like quartz, jasmine, jade and onyx. The mosaics contained allegorical scenes of the five senses.
In 1941, the Nazis stole the Amber Room from Tsarskoe Selo (which had been renamed Pushkin in 1937) and took it to Königsberg in East Prussia on the Baltic coast, where it was last seen in public in 1943. Some believe it was destroyed by Allied bombing, while others say the Nazis hid it in a mine or underground bunker.
"If the Amber Room lies hidden somewhere, it is most probably in some damp mine, which means it is almost certainly in a state of ruin," says Dr. Alexander Shedrinsky, a Russian-born amber expert and chemist who is an adjunct professor of conservation at the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. "Even before it was stolen, it was in poor shape, in need of restoration, and the amber pieces were falling out."
While the panels and mosaics disappeared during the war (one mosaic surfaced in Germany in 1997, and its ownership is being contested in a German court), the Russians were able to whisk most of the 100 or so objects in the Amber Room collection to safety in Siberia. These included tables, jewelry boxes and chess sets made of amber. (These objects are still part of the palace's collection, though now in storage after completing a tour of the United States in 1997-98.)
Two of the Florentine mosaics, including the one recently found in Germany, had already been recreated by Mr. Krylov's team before Russian government financing dried up in the mid-1990's. The loss of money threatened to cause an exodus of the best carvers from among about 25 men and women in the workshop, which Mr. Krylov founded under state aegis in 1982 at the Tsarskoe Selo Museum in the old palace. His only hope to save the project, and preserve what is perhaps the world's leading school of amber craftsmanship, was to look to the private sector. But he had neither the desire nor the knowledge to set up a slick, Western-style fund-raising campaign. He instead chose to leave it to fate.
The outcome has been curiously appropriate. While the Germans built the Amber Room, gave it to Russia as a gift and eventually stole it, the circle now comes full with German money paying to complete the Amber Room's reconstruction.
"I knew that sooner or later a major sponsor would appear, such is the will of God," Mr. Krylov said last September during ceremonies for a $3.5 million donation to his project from Ruhrgas, Germany's largest natural gas company. Ruhrgas had learned about the project through the newspapers and approached the Tsarskoe Selo Museum about it. According to Ivan Sautov, the museum's director, the ruble equivalent of $7.7 million had already been spent on it by the Soviet and then Russian government until the mid-1990's.
During the ceremonies, the Russian Minister of Culture, Vladimir Yegorov, emphasized that "Ruhrgas's initiative sends a positive signal for German-Russian relations because the Amber Room is both a legend and a symbol of the huge loss of art treasures suffered by Russia during the war."
Perhaps unwilling to dwell on dark chapters in its past, the German side attached another meaning to it. "The Amber Room has enormous emotional significance for both Germany and Russia," said Friedrich Spath, Ruhrgas's chairman. "And it is a leading symbol of a time when close German and Russian relations were a model for the world." With extensive business dealings in Russia for the last 25 years, purchasing up to one-third of its natural gas supplies there, Ruhrgas has a vested interest in continued good relations between the countries.
Today, Mr. Krylov's workshop is taut with activity as the craftspeople ply their trade with monkish solemnity. More than a year ago, when there was no money, only a few bothered to come to work, and only then to make souvenirs or work on private orders for European museums. Their simplicity and modesty is a great contrast to what outsiders see as an enormous effort to remake a fabled piece of art. "Any feeling of enthusiasm or pride has passed," Mr. Krylov said. "Now we only want to finish the project according to the high standards we set out."
In 1979, the Soviet Union abandoned any effort to recover the original Amber Room, deciding instead to rebuild it based on old photographs and the reminiscences of past museum curators. Work finally began in 1982 after various obstacles were overcome, the most important of which was the rediscovery of forgotten secrets of ancient amber guilds. Old methods of cutting and carving had to be relearned, but most challenging was unlocking the 18th-century mystery of dyeing amber, a process essential to enhancing the Amber Room's beauty. Credit for that achievement goes to the Mendeleev Chemical Institute in St. Petersburg, and that know-how is a closely guarded secret Mr. Krylov prefers not to discuss.
The Russians had a chance to test their skill in 1997 when the original mosaic surfaced in Germany. "It allowed us to compare our work with the original, and we saw that ours was just as good," Mr. Krylov said.
Though it is praised for its beauty and status as the world's largest amber creation, many see the Amber Room as a symbol of both a bygone age and the destruction European art suffered during the war. "Of course, the Amber Room is magnificent and its history alluring, but it has become more a symbol than a real object of art," said Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. "It is not a world masterpiece of art like a Rembrandt painting."
In addition to Ruhrgas's donation, a small contribution from a Manhattan philanthropist, Patti Birch, has also played a crucial role in the reconstruction. A year ago, Ms. Birch, a board member of the Museum of Modern Art and an honorary trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, donated $10,000 to purchase a collection of large, extremely rare pieces of amber, which were needed for the frames for the Amber Room's mosaics.
"Patti Birch's donation was very important, not necessarily in terms of dollars, but because it came at the right moment," said Dr. Shedrinsky, who follows the project closely and who introduced Ms. Birch to Mr. Sautov. "The collection, which had for decades been in private hands in Moscow, had just appeared on the market when she came forward with her donation. Without it someone else would have bought the collection, because at the time the Tsarskoe Selo Museum just didn't have the money."
While most of the secondary parts of the Amber Room have been completed -- the exquisite parquet floor and the elaborate Baroque gold-covered wooden carvings -- only about 40 percent of the amber panels have been restored. One long vertical amber panel is finished, as well as the lower perimeter along the floor, but bare wooden boards predominate, a harsh reminder of the destruction left by the war.
Now the Tsarskoe Selo Museum says it can complete the Amber Room reconstruction by April 2003, as stipulated by the contract it signed with Ruhrgas. It will be just in time for St. Petersburg's 300th anniversary.

第 6 页 共 6 页