Exhibition of amber works reconstructions

Until 30 October the exhibition of scientific reconstructions of amber works of the 16–18 centuries from the museum's collection works in the Kaliningrad Regional Amber Museum. For the most part, the originals disappeared at the end of the Second World War and are still missing. Some objects of this collection are in the permanent exposition of the museum, the major part of the collection is kept in the museum's storage.

Joint work of the museum and stone-carving artists on reconstruction of the lost amber works began in 1978 at the Leningrad Combine for Decorative and Applied Arts. Such masters as Vitaly and Gennady Yartsev, Alexandr Zhuravlyov, Alexandr Krylov, Albert Vanin, Alexandr Kolchin and others worked there back then. Many of them, including A.Zhuravlyov, A.Krylov and A.Vanin in the early 1980s changed the working place to the Research and Production Association "Restorer", which worked on recreation of the Amber Room in the Catherine Palace of the State Museum-Preserve "Tsarskoye Selo" (Pushkin, Leningrad oblast). At the end of the 1990s, eleven reconstructions of the lost objects from the Konigsberg museum collections were made by the LLC "Tsarskoselskaya Amber Workshop" founded to restore amber objects. In the recent years some reconstructed copies of works from the Konigsberg collections have been made by order of the Amber Museum by the Saint category Alexandr Krylov and Kaliningrad master Alexandr Korolyov.

Today, twenty seven reconstructions of amber works of the 16–18 centuries and five recreated fragments of the Amber Room are kept in the Amber Museum's collection. All objects are made based on black and white photos from the book by Alfred Rohde "Amber. The German Material. Its Artistic Treatment from the Middle Ages until 18th Century" (Berlin, 1937). The most part of originals was kept in Konigsberg – in the collections of King Castle and State Amber Manufactory.

Recreated based on the old technology, these works conduced revival of traditions of the artistic amber treatment and strengthened the interest to amber as a fabricating material in our country.