The encyclopédiste performed one important service for Catherine, which left its mark on her capital. Diderot recommended his friend Etienne Falconet to sculpt what has become the iconic image of St Petersburg.62 The project revealed Catherine’s wish to associate herself publicly with Peter the Great, and it was her good fortune that Elizabeth had cut the funding for a proposed equestrian statue of her father by the Rastrellis.63 Their project, which leaned too heavily on traditional civic monuments, would have been academic and unremarkable. By contrast, Falconet wrote to Diderot that he didn’t wish his monument to express ‘the victor over Charles XII but . . . the person of the founder, legislator, benefactor of his country’.64 Falconet’s aim was to express the youth of an emperor who proclaimed a new era in Russian history – an era that Catherine was busy consolidating. As the empress wanted not only to celebrate Peter, but also to boost her own image, she carefully monitored the evolution of Falconet’s thinking65 and brought together the names of Peter and Catherine on the brief legend that she composed for the statue’s wild and unusual plinth.
The fifty-year-old sculptor travelled to St Petersburg with his eighteen-year-old pupil, Marie-Anne Collot. Possibly his mistress and certainly the wife of his son, Collot was an accomplished sculptress who was credited by Falconet himself with being responsible for the head of what has become known as The Bronze Horseman66 – perhaps a ploy to silence scandal, by suggesting that Collot was a collaborator and not just Falconet’s alarmingly young lover.
When a model for the statue was exhibited in 1770, Falconet became concerned by the cross-winds in Senate Square, where his commission was to be sited. The snake was added at this point to provide another stabilising contact between the pedestal and the statue.67 Seven years later the actual bronze was successfully cast, but the following year Falconet returned to France and never saw his statue in place. The plinth on which it stood was a mammoth rock found in the Karelian wastes, over which Peter had exerted his mastery when he established Petersburg. The transport of the rock was itself a triumph of science over nature. Ivan Betskoy – director of the Bureau of Imperial Buildings and Gardens, who was in charge of the statue project – had a Greek aide-de-camp, Captain Marin Carburi de Ceffalonie. This man, who would be murdered by embittered workers on his native island of Cephalonia, had been forced to flee Venice in 1759 for slashing the face of a woman who resisted his advances and came to St Petersburg possibly as a spy for the Venetian Republic.68 When a suitably impressive stone was found about thirteen kilometres from the capital, it was Carburi de Ceffalonie, aided by the architect Yuri Felten, who engineered its shipping to Senate Square. The 138-tonne rock had to be excavated and then hoisted onto a rolling platform, to carry it down to the shore of the Gulf of Finland. By March 1770, after some false starts, it was rolled onto a huge raft, which was towed by two ships to the quay fronting Senate Square. Absurdly, after all the effort, the rock – originally twelve metres long and six metres high – was chiselled away until it was nearly halved. Contemporaries found it ‘a little rock under a great horse’,69 ‘almost too small for proportion’.70 In fact the relationship is perfect, and skilful cutting made it appear like a wave. With its forward and upward thrust, the rock propels the emperor – poised with latent power on his horse – into action.
Transporting the ‘thunder rock’, 1777.
The statue was unveiled in August 1782, the year that marked the centenary of Ivan and Peter the Great’s joint accession. The city shook with gun salutes, drum rolls and trumpet voluntaries. As the scaffolding that had concealed the statue clattered to the ground, a figure darted out from the crowd and fell prostrate before the rearing figure. Catherine was alarmed by the athletic intruder until it was discovered that he was an octogenarian who had served under Peter and – with his old naval uniform flapping loose from his ageing body – had come to pay his last respects. The man was given a pension by the empress and died when he reached 100.71
The motto – ‘To Peter I from Catherine II – appeared in Latin on the western side and in Russian on the eastern side of the ‘thunder rock’, so-called because it was said to have been split by lightning. The outstretched arm of the emperor expressed ‘parental affection for his people’,72 a sentiment that was pleasing to Catherine. In a letter to Melchior Grimm she observed that Peter ‘had a look of contentment which . . . encouraged me to do better in the future’.73
As the cultural and political significance of The Bronze Horseman remains unsurpassed by any other Petersburg monument, it is both predictable and apt that such a defining symbol of the city was created by a foreigner. A few years after its inauguration, Eleanor Cavanagh, an Irish maid to the visiting Catherine Wilmot, was not the first nor the last person to be terrified by Falconet’s work: ‘I thought the screech wou’d have choak’d me when turning round my head what wou’d I see leaping over a rail rock but a giant of a man on the back of a dragin of a horse.’74 The impact of the statue reverberated through the lives and works of poets, novelists and activists, who explored the positive and negative repercussions of Peter the Great’s act of hubris. The 1825 Decembrist revolt against tsarist absolutism would take inspiration from Falconet’s vision of benevolent might. A decade later Alexander Pushkin praised Peter while questioning his legacy, in a vision of The Bronze Horseman come alive and riding roughshod over the lives of Petersburg’s inhabitants. Seventy years on, the novelist Andrei Biely would use the statue as a symbol of the dangerous divisions facing Russia in 1905. Falconet’s Bronze Horseman patrolled ‘the borders not only of political fact but also political imagination’. The statue was part of the capital’s ‘official architecture’, which reinforced a ‘police state in the mind’.75
Falconet’s The Bronze Horseman, detail.
As part of Catherine’s cultural putsch, the Academy of Arts was established in 1764. The annual intake was of sixty boys between the ages of five and six, who were mainly drawn from the lower classes, although ‘unhealthy or deformed children’ were excluded. Pupils were ‘clothed and kept’ and their education was broad. The most talented proceeded ‘to instructions in the Arts’, the rest to ‘mechanical trades’. Students with real artistic talent studied life drawing, perspective, anatomy, iconology and mythology. Once every three years, twelve prize-winning students were sent abroad. There was a theatre department filled with boys and girls taken from the foundling hospital, who were taught ‘declamation, music, dancing, gesticulation and mimickry’.76 Elizabeth had launched the project, but her ‘untimely death prevented her from completing the necessary regulations’. Eager ‘to perfect an undertaking so advantageous to the interests of our subjects’,77 Catherine was left to provide the institution with statutes and adequate funding both for its premises and for its day-to-day functioning. Ivan Shuvalov chose Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe to be the architect and the Frenchman produced a monumental, rectangular building faced with Doric columns and pilasters. The foundation stone was laid in the summer of 1765 and Catherine hoped it would set the style for a more ascetic architecture in her capital. De la Mothe was consequently named court architect in 1766 and appointed the first Professor of Architecture at the Academy. The sober style followed when De la Mothe designed the imposing new gostiny dvor on the Nevsky Prospekt. Later he built the powerful New Holland Arch with its stark Tuscan Doric columns, an austere order which – following excavations at Paestum, Pompeii and Herculaneum attracted architects and their powerful clients. Catherine became empress in the year before the Pompeii excavations got under way, and only a few years after Johann Joachim Winckelmann – the German archaeologist and art historian – publicised the new fascination with classical art. The intention behind neoclassicism, wrote Winckelmann was to achieve ‘noble simplicity and calm grandeur’.
Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe’s Academy of Arts.
Reflecting the tastes of the Empress Elizabeth, Antonio Rinaldi had been appointed as the architect of Peter and Catherine’s young court. He designed an el
egant rococo bolthole for the grand duchess in the southern corner of the park at Oranien-baum, along with an all-weather tobogganing pavilion in powder-blue and white. Rinaldi, following shifts in taste, moved on from Elizabethan baroque towards the lucid neoclassicism of Catherine’s reign. For Grigory Orlov – Catherine’s early favourite – he designed the Marble Palace in a sober neoclassical style. Begun in 1768, the palace overlooks the Neva on one side and Tsaritsyn Field on the other, and today it functions as extra exhibition space for the Russian Museum. It was also for Orlov that Rinaldi built the magisterial, yet austere palace at Gatchina. Catherine delighted in the complex and, when Orlov died in 1783, bought the palace for her son, Paul.
Sometime during 1772 Falconet – whose Bronze Horseman offered economical energy and poise in place of baroque flamboyance – showed Catherine a sketchbook full of designs and decorations based on classical forms. Intrigued by their restraint, she was considerably less impressed by Falconet’s plans for an enormous mock-Roman palace in the grounds of Tsarskoe Selo. Although he lost a commission, Falconet helped the empress engage with the quiet power of the neoclassical style.78 Its forthrightness appealed to her, despite the fact that it became strongly associated with republican ideals, after Jacques-Louis David’s neoclassical painting The Oath of the Horatii was heralded as a republican call to arms in France. Catherine realised that the essential strength of neoclassicism could purify the frippery of Elizabethan baroque and architecturally align the capital with the new European mainstream. Baroque and rococo were clearly falling out of fashion. During Catherine’s reign, a visitor called Rastrelli’s palace at Tsarskoe Selo a ‘triumph’ of the ‘barbarous taste I have seen in these northern kingdoms’.79 By the time the Reverend Edward Daniel Clarke visited in the early nineteenth century, tastes had shifted so much that he cited the palace as ‘a compound of what an architect ought to avoid’.80
So, having invited a cosmopolitan array of architects to improve building procedures and amplify the stylistic scope of architecture in and around St Petersburg, Catherine fixed on the restrained order of neoclassicism and the feigned informality of the English garden. To realise her vision, the empress first turned to a Scot, Charles Cameron – an architect, interior designer and landscape gardener who had studied antiquity in Italy. Later she turned to the Italian Giacomo Quarenghi, whose considerable architectural contributions to St Petersburg continued during the reign of Alexander I. Cameron arrived in the late 1780s and went to work just outside the capital at Tsarskoe Selo. He began by replacing some of Rastrelli’s assertive palace interiors with more intimate themed rooms, designing every detail of the ensemble, right down to the locks, keys and door handles. There were medallions bas-reliefs, niches with vases and statues, friezes incorporating mythological scenes and variously coloured marbles. While Cameron’s exteriors tended to clean lines and economy, his interiors were ordered but often intense.
Sitting in a somewhat strange relationship to Rastrelli’s palace, the open colonnade, or Cameron Gallery, was a covered walkway supported by Ionic columns, with an enclosed space running through the centre. The loggia provided Catherine with a place to promenade on the frequent rainy days, a belvedere from which to enjoy her steadily evolving park. There were bronze busts of ancient philosophers to stimulate reflection, and one of a contemporary politician, Charles James Fox, leader of the British Parliamentary opposition, whom Catherine credited with preventing war between their countries.81 At one end of the gallery there was an imposing staircase. When the empress became too elderly to climb it, Cameron added a ramp. There was a tactful majesty about the ensemble. It was no baroque allegro, like the gilded façade of Rastrelli’s palace, but – as the contemporary poet Gavrila Derzhavin suggested – ‘the temple where the graces dance to the sound of the harp’.82
The Cameron Gallery at Tsarskoe Selo.
In order to carry out these Russian projects, Cameron advertised in the Edinburgh Evening Courant: ‘For Her Majesty the Empress of all the Russias – Wanted – Two clerks, who have been employed by an Architect or very considerable Builder . . . Two Master Masons, Two Master Bricklayers’, and for many more ‘masters of the above work’ who can ‘bring with them proper certificates of their abilities and good behaviour’. One hundred and forty masons, plasterers, wives and children made the journey. However, after they arrived, their hosts were not impressed by their capacity for work. Used to commanding an unreservedly obedient native workforce, the Russians found the foreigners lazy. Arriving late for work, the British left early. Not only did they celebrate their own holidays, but they also took the opportunity to enjoy Russian ones as well. Consequently Catherine demanded stricter controls, and some Britons decided to return home. Those prepared to work hard stayed until the gallery, cold baths and Agate Pavilion were finished in 1787. The cost of these works – the lavish use of precious materials such as malachite, lapis lazuli, jasper and agate – was enormous.83 As Catherine put it to the Scot, when she viewed their achievement at Tsarskoe Selo, ‘It is indeed very handsome mais ça coûte.’84
Gardens were supremely important to Catherine. As a grand duchess, she had sought their seclusion as a temporary respite from the pressures of the court.85 As an empress, she cherished their solitude for personal reflection and privileged tête-à-têtes, where green and shady spaces permitted a focus that was not always possible amid the hubbub at court. In a letter to Voltaire, Catherine declared, ‘I profoundly despise straight lines and paired paths. I hate fountains which torture water’86 and Charles Cameron – collaborating with the gardener John Bush of Hackney – avoided the strictness of the French garden. When, at the end of the 1770s, the empress became influenced by the neoGothic style emanating from England and expressed her passion for curving alleys, lawns and picturesque groupings of trees, it reflected a political and cultural realignment. 87 The decadence and dangerous unrest in France prompted a move towards the quiet respectability of the English heritage. Catherine’s enthusiasm for the controlled freedom of the English garden was an indication of her willingness to employ intimacy and apparent spontaneity as disarming political tools. The English Ambassador, Sir James Harris, noted that the empress ‘considered joint walks through the garden as a sign of great distinction’.88
Bush not only gardened at Tsarskoe Selo, but was also partly responsible for maintaining the huge greenhouses that permitted exotic fruits – oranges, lemons, peaches and nectarines – to be grown at that latitude. Théophile Gautier later observed that such fruit is ‘one of the great manias of Northern peoples’ and added that hothouses ‘half buried in the snow’ were not what they were cracked up to be, a ‘stove, however well heated, never quite makes up for the sunshine’. There was, he suggested, a resulting coarseness of taste.89
Catherine’s passion for things English was revealed in an order for a 944-piece, fifty-place dinner service from Josiah Wedgwood, featuring 1,222 hand-painted panoramas of English castles, country houses and landscape gardens. While it was undeniably prestigious for the English potter to produce such a large service for the empress, Wedgwood was worried by the investment required to fulfil the order: ‘Do you think the subjects must all be from real views and that it is expected from us to send draftsmen all over the Kingdom to take these views?’90 But the commission was too grand to refuse, even though the Green Frog Service – one of the most sober and homely to be owned by the Romanovs – was originally ordered for the unimportant, neo-Gothic Kekerekeksinen, or ‘Frog Marsh’ Palace. This stood on swampy ground between the capital and Tsarskoe Selo, hence its croaking name and the green frog emblem to be found on each piece of the service. For Catherine, the palace was a staging post, and she only used its tableware on rare occasions when the establishment – renamed Chesme Palace in 1780- hosted official functions. Despite the fact that Wedgwood baulked at the size of the enterprise, fifty covers proved inadequate for imperial banquets, and imitation items had to be produced in St Petersburg’s Imperial Porcelain Factory.91
The Green Frog Service featured English castles and country estates, while Cameron’s new garden around the Great Pond at Tsarskoe Selo was inspired by Lancelot Capability Brown’s gardens at Stowe.92 Monuments set up in the park to celebrate the people dear to the empress, or the victories of her busy armies against Turkey and Persia, were either improvisations on follies in that English garden or based on designs by Palladio, who exerted great influence on Cameron, and therefore on St Petersburg and its environs.
Built between 1781 and 1796, the Palace of Pavlovsk was Catherine’s gift to her son Paul and his consort, the Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna, in honour of their son Alexander, who had been born in 1777. The estate was landscaped by Charles Cameron, who dammed the River Slavyanka to form a lake. He scattered a good variety of shrubs and trees in copses and clumps, informally framing the house and disclosing the occasional folly. The main building had been conceived by him as a villa rather than a palace. Its central section recalls Palladio’s Villa ‘Capra’ outside Vicenza, and its stunted cupola, sitting on a circle of thin, tightly grouped columns, is reminiscent of Rome’s Pantheon.93 On either side of the three-storey central building, semicircular colonnades embrace the spacious front courtyard, which is approached along the lime-tree avenue that Cameron also created. Behind the villa the ground falls away, affording an imposing view of the central structure from across the small river. The original ensemble proved insufficient for Paul and Maria, who had Cameron’s mansion enlarged and the interior redecorated by Vincenzo Brenna, their court architect. Cameron, weary of interference with his ideas, withdrew and – for the rest of his life – undertook prosaic projects in the capital.
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