Museum of Miniatures Entrance Ticket

Museum of Miniatures Entrance Ticket

Everything began as an exibition of microminiature art in 1996 in St. Petersburg, Russia. A year later the same exhibition traveled to Prague and located on Jilská street, Prague 1 – Old Town. After its success in Prague the exibition got its new name "Muzeum miniatur" and obtained a permanent residence on the premises of the Strahov Monastery in Prague 1. Today the Museum of Miniatures in Prague owns one of the largest collections of microminiatures in the world, including 29 exhibits. The collection includes works by three authors: Nikolai Aldunin (1956–2009), Edward Ter Ghazarian (1923–2012) and Anatoly Konenko (*1954).

Microminiature is a type of art which began developing in the 1980s. The basic feature of this art is impossibility to see the work of art with naked eye and the necessity to view it through an optical device such as a microscope or a magnifying glass. The size is not exactly defined — microminiature dimension may be a couple of millimetres or just a couple of tenths of a millimetre.

Artists producing microminiatures are called Microminiaturists. There is an unwritten rule saying that every beginning microminiaturist should create a couple of works of the “classical microminiature” such as an inscription on human hair, on a rice grain or a pinhead, a camel train in a needle ear, or a shoed flea. This list may differ by country as a subject of national tradition.