The idea came from Frederick I of Prussia, who traded his precious vote as an elector of the Holy Roman Emperor to secure his own hereditary kingship. Frederick I amused himself daily with amber chessmen, candlesticks, and chandeliers. He quaffed beer from amber tankards and smoked from pipes fitted with amber mouthpieces. So in 1701 Frederick directed his court architect, Andreas Schülter, to install panels of amber for a study in his Charlottenburg palace.
It took four years of searching the Baltic coast to find enough jewel grade amber. Eventually, each rough amber chunk was sliced to no more than five millimeters thick, polished, and sometimes heated to change its color. The pieces were then fitted jigsaw style into mosaic panels of floral scrollwork, busts, and heraldic symbols. Each panel included a relief of the Prussian coat of arms-a crowned eagle in profile-and many were backed in silver to enhance their brilliance.
The room was partially completed in 1712 when Peter the Great of Russia visited Prussia. A year later Frederick I died and was succeeded by his son, Frederick William. Harboring no desire to spend any more crown money on his father's caprice, he ordered the amber panels dismantled and packed away.
In 1716 Frederick William signed a Russian-Prussian alliance with Peter the Great against Sweden. To commemorate the treaty, the amber panels were ceremonially presented to Peter and transported to St. Petersburg the following January. Peter, more concerned with building the Russian Navy than collecting art, simply stored them away. But grateful, he reciprocated the gift with 248 soldiers, a lathe, and a wine cup he crafted himself. Included among the soldiers were 55 of his tallest guardsmen, this in recognition of the Prussian king's passion for tall warriors.
Thirty years passed until Empress Elizabeth, Peter's daughter, directed Rastrelli, her court architect, to display the panels in a study at the Russian Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. In 1755 Elizabeth ordered the panels carried to her summer residence in Tsarskoe Selo, thirty miles south of St. Petersburg, and installed in what came to be known as the Catherine Palace.
Over the next twenty years, 48 square meters of additional amber panels, most emblazoned with the Romanov crest and elaborate decorations, were added to the original 36 square meters. The Prussian king even contributed to the creation, sending another panel, this one with a bas-relief of the two headed eagle of the Russian Tsars. Eventually, 86 square meters of amber were crafted, the finished walls dotted with fanciful figurines, floral garlands, tulips, roses, sea shells, monogrammes, and rocaille, all of amber, in glittering shades of brown, red, yellow, and orange. Rastrelli framed each panel in a cartouche of boiserie, Louis Quinze style, separating each panel vertically by pairs of narrow mirrored pilasters adorned with bronze candelabra, everything gilded to blend with the amber.
The centers of four panels were dotted with exquisite Florentine mosaics fashioned from polished jasper and agate and framed in gilded bronze. A ceiling mural was added, along with an intricate parquet floor of inlaid oak, maple, sandalwood, rosewood, walnut, and mahogany, itself as magnificent as the surrounding amber walls.
Five Königsberg masters labored until 1770, when the room was finally declared finished. Empress Elizabeth was so delighted that she routinely used the space to impress foreign ambassadors. It also served as a kunstkammer, a cabinet of curiosities for her and later Tsars, the place where royal treasures, most of amber, could be displayed.
Incredibly, the panels survived 170 years and the Bolshevik Revolution intact. Restorations were done in 1760, 1810, 1830, 1870, 1918, 1935, and 1938. An extensive restoration was planned in the 1940s, but on June 22, 1941 German troops invaded the Soviet Union. On September 17th Nazi troops took Tsarskoe Selo and the palaces in and around, including the Catherine Palace, which had become a state museum under the communists.
In the days before its capture, museum officials hastily shipped all of the small objects in the Amber Room to eastern Russia. But the panels themselves proved impossible to remove. In an effort to conceal them, a layer of wallpaper was slapped over, but the disguise fooled no one. Hitler ordered the Amber Room returned to Königsberg which, in his mind, was where it rightly belonged, since a Prussian king had first conceived the idea. Six men took thirty-six hours to dismantle the panels and meticulously packed the twenty tons of amber in crates, which were shipped west by truck convoy and rail, eventually re-installed in the Königsberg castle along with a vast collection of Prussian art. A 1942 German news article proclaimed the event a "return to its true home." Picture postcards were issued of the restored amber treasure. The exhibit became the most popular of all Nazi museum spectacles.
The first Allied bombardment of Königsberg occurred in August 1944. Some of the mirrored pilasters and a few of the smaller amber panels were damaged. Between January and April 1945, the Soviet Army steadily approached Königsberg. The panels were then hidden. The last German document that mentioned the Amber Room was dated January 12, 1945 and noted that the panels were being packed for transport to Saxony. Trucks eventually left Königsberg on April 6, 1945 and were never seen again. Making true what Robert Browning penned many years ago: Suddenly, as rare things will, it vanished.
