22 November 2023 to 4 February 2024, three rooms in the Golden Enfilade of the Catherine Palace house our Brighter than the Sun exhibition commemorating twenty years since the end of the Amber Room's nearly quarter of a century restoration.

With over a hundred objects on display, the exhibition covers 400 years of the Amber Room's history from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, and for the first time showcases the entirety of the Museum's amber collection, one of the most significant in Europe and the largest in Russia.

Starting in the Portrait Room, the display covers the coming of Prussian King Frederick William I's Amber Study to Russia as a diplomatic gift to Tsar Peter the Great. An interactive map of the Amber Study's journey from Berlin to St Petersburg and the portraits of the two monarchs and Russian grenadiers are accompanied by the sounds of sea waves imitating a walk among the dunes of the Curonian (Courish) Spit where amber has long been mined.

Continuing into the Amber Room, the exhibition sheds light on the amber masterpiece's history before World War II and its post-war restoration project led by architect Alexander Kedrinsky. Additionally on display: the original mid-eighteenth-century Florentine mosaic 'Touch and Smell' which was stolen in 1941 and then found in Germany in 1997 and returned to our Museum; and the nineteenth-century model of the equestrian statue of Frederick the Great by Christian Daniel Rauch, which was captured in the well-known Autochrome of 1917 and last time graced the Amber Room at its end-of-reconstruction ceremony in 2003.

In the Picture Hall, an 'amber workshop interior' offers our Museum's collection of hand-crafted amber items, such as (possibly) Empress Elizabeth Petrovna's seventeenth-century game board, a 1705 casket box topped by Venus and Cupid figures by Gottfried Turau (the creator of the Amber Study), an hourglass, an ink set, boxes, paperweights, medallions, hookah mouthpieces, and shaving items. The 'workshop' setting also displays various tools and equipment provided by specialists of the Tsarskoselskaya Amber Workshop who restored the eighteenth-century masterpiece. Canary singing sounds are not just relaxing but reminding of ancient workshops where live canaries served as a clean air indicator.