In Hermitage St. Petersburg XII 2014, Candida Höfer captures the corridor of the Raphael Loggias of the State Hermitage Museum. Over two weeks in St Petersburg and its surrounding suburbs, Höfer methodically turned her lens toward sites steeped in cultural resonance – the Mariinsky Theatre, Yusupov Palace Theatre, the Russian National Library, and the gilded palaces of Pavlovsk and Pushkin among them.

The corridor of Raphael Loggias, as depicted in the present work, embodies an architectural lexicon of replication and reverence. Modelled after the Vatican’s Raphael Rooms, the corridor is a palimpsest of classical ideals, its vaulted ceilings adorned with intricate biblical scenes, their delicate frescoes interspersed with ornamental motifs. The play of symmetry and light reveals a silent choreography, where architectural elements – columns, arches, frescoed vaults – perform against the soft diffusion of ambient light.

The Hermitage itself, with its sprawling collections and labyrinthine corridors, is one of the world’s most illustrious repositories of art and artefacts. Founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great, its collection of over three million objects resides across six historic buildings along the Palace Embankment. Yet, Höfer sidesteps the spectacle of the artefacts themselves, choosing instead to meditate on the spaces they inhabit. Her lens turns this corridor into something transcendent – a quiet study of permanence and the human impulse to enshrine beauty.

This image is a dialectic between space and time. Höfer's meticulous framing and the absence of human presence imbue the corridor with an otherworldly stillness, a reminder that such spaces, designed for movement and dialogue, now exist largely as monuments to themselves. In Hermitage St. Petersburg XII 2014, the building emerges not only as a corridor of history but as a living artefact, bearing the weight of its own narrative within Höfer’s tableau.