The Museum of Urban Sculpture was founded in 1930 to succeed in preserving of the Necropolis and it was later put in charge of all the sculptures monuments and memorial plaques of Petersburg. The oldest cemetery in St. Petersburg - Lazarevskoye, now the 18th century Necropolis, a unique historical and artistic monument of the 18th - first half of the 19th centuries. Military leaders, scientists, statesmen, diplomats, writers, architects, industrialists and artists who exerted a considerable impact on the history and science, culture and literature of Russia, are buried here. Among them there is Russia's greatest scientist Mikhail Lomonosov, first Russian sinologist Nikita Bichurin, the talented portrait painter Alexei Antropov, architects Ivan Starov and Andrei Vbronikhin. In the early 1820s near Lazarevskoye cemetery there was founded another one - Tikhvinskoye, now it is the Necropolis of the Masters of Arts. In the course of the 19th - early 20th centuries it assumed the character of a unique pantheon of prominent personalities in the realm of Russian culture. Nikolai Karamzin, Ivan Krylov, Feodor Dostoyevsky, Mikhail Glinka, Modest Mousorgsky, Alexander Borodin, Piotr Chaikovsky are only some of names in the long list of writers, artists, actors and musicians buried here.