The Chambers of the Romanov Boyars

One of the first museums in Russia: it opened in 1859, thirteen years before the Historical Museum, and opened already as a reconstruction of boyar life — an idea unheard of at the time. What is to be looked at is not authenticity down to the nail but the conception itself: how the middle of the nineteenth century pictured the seventeenth, and what came of it. Barry and Pugin were building…