The Hermitage runs an evening series called Dialogue of the Arts: a curator from one of the collections comes out to the Hermitage Theatre with a musician, and together they walk the audience through objects most visitors rush past. On 30 October 2026 the subject is Western European glyptics — carved gemstones from the Renaissance onwards. The curator is Svetlana Kokareva, the head of the glyptics collection.
💎 What glyptics is, and why to come
Glyptics is the art of carving on hard stones: cameos, intaglios, seals cut into cornelian, chalcedony, agate, sardonyx. The Hermitage holds one of the world's great glyptic collections — most of it in storage, visible only in the small rooms off the Jordan Staircase and in temporary shows. An evening with the curator is one of the few ways to see pieces that otherwise live in the vault.
The programme pairs the lecture with chamber music of the Renaissance and early Baroque — the sound world the engravers worked in. The evening lasts about ninety minutes with no interval.
🎭 Hermitage Theatre: where it happens
The Hermitage Theatre sits inside the museum complex, between the Winter Palace and the Great Hermitage, overlooking the Neva. Enter through the museum's main courtyard on Palace Square; the theatre has its own box office near the Rastrelli Gallery. Tickets to Dialogue of the Arts sell separately from the museum admission and go on sale about three weeks ahead on hermitage-theatre.ru — the hall seats around 250, so sellouts are the norm.
