From the hand-carved, parquet floors to the golden figurines, everything about the Mississippi Art Pavilion in Jackson is royal - fit for any czar or czarina.
The transformation of 54,000 square feet of mundane office cubicles to the lavish recreations of five rooms inside the historic palaces of St. Petersburg, Russia, has cost about $8.6 million. But the results are guaranteed to put Mississippi on the 1996 cultural map."The Palaces of St. Petersburg: Russian Imperial Style Exhibition" opens March 1 and runs through Aug. 31. It has been rated as a top 100 event in North America for 1996 - along with other notable events such as the Summer Olympics in Atlanta.
Already, 108,000 tickets have been sold, and organizers hope that 400,000 people will visit the exhibit during its six-month run.
"This will be a visual feast," said Jack Kyle, the key organizer of the exhibit. "This is the largest cultural endeavor ever taken in Mississippi."
"There are more than 600 objects drawn from collections from the palaces of Russia. We couldn't move the palace here, so we did the closest thing by recreating the rooms."
The exhibit consists of the five rooms, which are exact replicas of the palace rooms built by Russian craftsmen, and adjoining displays of furniture, art and other objects from the palaces.
It is the first time in the United States that palace rooms have been authentically re-created for an exhibit, Kyle said.
"A lot of people have done vignettes, but this is the first time people have been able to walk in the room," he said.
Peter Schaffer, one of the owners of A La Vieille Russie in New York City, a gallery that specializes in Russian art and contributed to the 1991 Catherine the Great exhibit, agreed.
"The people will get to see the actual way it is, the actual flavor of the palaces," said Schaffer. "It is not like an exhibit that is hanging on a wall - the rooms are recreated."
The palace exhibit grew from the humanitarian effort by the Jackson medical community, which has donated more than $20 million in medicine, medical services, supplies and equipment to Russia over the past 10 years. In 1993, the Jackson group formed Mississippians Reaching Out.
As a gesture of thanks, the Russian medical community in St. Petersburg offered to loan the priceless palace objects. In 1994, when the opportunity arose to develop this exposition, citizens throughout the state organized The Mississippi Commission for International Cultural Exchange Inc., a nonprofit educational and cultural organization.
Kyle was hired in June 1994 as the executive director.
The native Mississippian was no stranger to elaborate exhibits, having been involved with the Memphis-based Wonders Series, a series of exhibitions of artifacts from historical periods.
The Wonders Series included Ramses the Great in 1987, Catherine the Great in 1991, Splendors of the Ottoman Sultans in 1992, the Etruscans in 1992 and Napoleon in 1993.
He accepted the position, determined to go beyond what had been done in the past.
"Three weeks later, I was in Russia meeting with six palaces," said Kyle. With an interpreter, Kyle began to negotiate with the museum's directors, chief curators and departmental directors to develop the concept and select the objects for the exhibit.
He finally decided on five rooms from the Peterhof, Tsarskoje Selo (Catherine's Palace), Gatchina and Pavlovsk palaces. The result is the largest Russian exhibit ever in the United States and the first U.S.-Russia collaborative effort to exhibit outside of Russia.
The project is being funded in part by donations from private corporations. The state Legislature also contributed $1.5 million, with the stipulation that admission would not exceed $3 for students through high school. The remainder will be funded by ticket sales and other revenues.
"It is not our objective to make money," said Kyle. "We hope to come out with a balanced budget in this project."
The rooms will be housed in the Art Pavilion, which was built in 1970 to meet the need for exposition space.
In August 1995, the construction began on the St. Petersburg exhibit.
"We have rebuilt the building entirely, specifically and exclusively for this event," said Kyle. "We have taken a shell of a building and turned it into a world-class museum."
One of the highlights of the rooms is the intricately floral and geometric-designed floors, which were made by Russian artists and master craftsmen using eight types of imported wood. The floors were then shipped to Jackson in huge crates.
"We never saw a rug on the floor in Russia," said Mack. "That is because the floors are so magnificent."
Sculptors and restorers casted copies of the supporting columns with female figures from the Lantern Study at the Pavlovsk Palace and figures from the marble mantles of the Blue Formal Sitting Room at Catherine's Palace.
"We've received shipments of ornate classical moldings, two 11-foot tall female classical figures, wood panels and the magnificent parquet inlay wood floors," said Kyle.
Other recreations include the imperial baldachin, a velvet cloth with spun-gold thread, from the Throne Hall at Gatchina Palace.
In some cases, the exhibit room will be in better condition than the rooms Kyle saw in Russia.
"The Lantern Room in Russia is damaged from water pipes that burst in the heating system," said Kyle. "The moisture absorbed into the sculptures which they are now trying to repair."
The final touches of the exhibit are the original furnishings, including furniture, porcelains, clocks, paintings and tapestries that were loaned by the Russian palaces.
In addition to the five re-created rooms, 11 galleries will display a cross-section of objects from the collections of Russian emperors and their families encompassing the reigns of Peter the Great through the last czar, Nicholas II.
Only one item in the exhibit comes from the United States: the Imperial Gatchina Palace Egg, created by the firm of Peter Carl Faberge in 1902.
The egg was a gift from Czar Nicholas II to his mother, the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorova. It was sold after the Communist Revolution in 1917 and is now displayed in the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, which loaned it to the St. Petersburg exhibit.
Dr. Nickolai Tretyakov, director of Gatchina Palace, said that if the egg had not been sold abroad after the Communist Revolution in 1917, it would have have either been in the collection at Gatchina Palace, the State Hermitage Museum or the Kremlin Armory Museum.
The egg is a marvel of intricate work with rows of seed pearls that divide the surface into panels and separate the top and bottom sections. It is painted in a gold and green leaf pattern with pink roses and red ribbons tied to a variety of bows. A tambourine, horns, an artist's palette and flaming torches are inside.
The egg is among a dozen other Faberge creations in the exhibit such as a paperweight with silver lizards over lapis lazuli, a blue opaque stone.
The largest object in the exhibit is Alexander II's gold coronation carriage, which is about 9 feet tall and 18 feet long.