Jasper vases and bowls decorate the halls of the Hermitage - this material was valued for its richness of shades not only by craftsmen, but also by the monarchs who commissioned it. Nowadays, it is difficult to imagine that someone would be able to create an entire room out of this stone. But, Orenburg masters managed to accomplish this task.
The variegated jasper of Mount Polkovnik has been known for 250 years. The stones mined there are characterized by unusual patterns - as if some magician had painted bizarre patterns on the stones with a brush. It is believed that local jasper has more than 350 different shades.
The work was supervised by Nikolay Mestyashev, a master stone cutter, who has been working with jasper for more than 20 years. According to him, the task of creating an entire room from this stone was not an easy one. Jasper is a very hard material, the craftsmen sawed through less than a centimeter in a minute to gradually reveal the stone pattern and create real masterpieces. From scratch, such work would have taken at least 4-5 years, but the stonecutters already had the material, so it took a little over a year.
The 75-square-meter room is decorated with jasper panels consisting of plates no thicker than 4 mm. Twenty-three tons of stone were processed for their production and only three were selected for the panels.
The collection of works made of semi-precious stone - various vases and caskets, which Mestyashev collected over 46 years, is now stored in the Jasper Room.
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