Without making such an impact as the foreigners Cameron and Quarenghi, Russian architects were coming into their own and were now making an important and lasting contribution to the St Petersburg cityscape. Nikolai Lvov was a Renaissance man whose talents included not only architecture, but also engineering and poetry. He compiled a seminal volume of folk songs, which has been mined by Russian and foreign composers – Beethoven drew on it for themes in his Razumovsky Quartets.94 Lvov’s impressive neoclassical Central Post Office on Pochtamts-kaya Street is one of the few administrative buildings constructed in the eighteenth century that still serves a similar purpose today.
Yuri Felten was the son of Peter the Great’s head chef and there is something of the wedding cake or sugar subtlety about some of his buildings. St Catherine’s Lutheran Church, which Felten built on Vasilevsky Island, has an iced, almost over-decorated façade, and his tendency towards confection is most successful when at its most extravagant – as in the unrestrained excess of his St John the Baptist Church at Chesme. Named after the successful 1770 naval battle against the Ottoman Empire, Catherine’s country palace and church have long since been absorbed by the expansion of St Petersburg to the south. Felten’s exuberant early work reflects not only his father’s creations for the table, but also his apprenticeship under Rastreili. His mature work, however, reflects a developing neoclassicism: the wrought-iron gate and railings around the Summer Garden, the exterior of the Zubov Wing of the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, and his important contribution to the evolving Winter Palace complex – the Large Hermitage.
Ivan Starov successfully designed palaces at Bogoroditsky and Bobriki near Tula for Catherine’s illegitimate son by Grigory Orlov. As a result, he won important commissions in the capital. The Cathedral of the Trinity in the Alexander Nevsky Monastery is fronted by a robust Tuscan portico while its colonnaded cupola closely resembled Jacques-Germain Soufflot’s Church of Sainte-Geneviève – Paris’s present day Panthéon. Starov’s masterpiece was Catherine’s gift to Prince Potempkin, the Tauride Palace, built between 1783 and 1788. Catherine generously repurchased her gift from the prince so that he could cover his debts and then presented it to him again in 1790, only – absurdly – to buy it back from his heirs after his death in 1791. Sited so as to overlook the Neva, its view was spoiled in the mid-nineteenth century by a huge water tower and its adjacent buildings. The vast neo-Palladian palace, one of the largest in St Petersburg, was celebrated by the poet Derzhavin for its simplicity and sublimity. The extensive park was the work of Capability Brown’s pupil, William Gould, who imported trees and shrubs from England and produced a twenty-four-hectare park, creating an impression of delicately ordered rurality in the Russian capital. After working for Potempkin to such stunning effect, Gould was appointed Imperial Gardener in 1793.
Giacomo Quarenghi’s early exposure to Palladio remained an influence on his life’s work and, therefore, upon St Petersburg. Born in Bergamo, Quarenghi studied in Rome, first with the German-born painter Anton Raphael Mengs, and then with Antoine Decrezet, a friend of Winckelmann. Spotted by a Russian nobleman who was scouting for Catherine, Quarenghi arrived in St Petersburg in 1780 and became responsible for much of the neoclassical city that we know today. Distinguishable by his huge, bruised bulbous nose,95 which made it seem as if the northern climate had either given him an incurable cold or driven him to drink, Quarenghi was appreciative of his contemporaries. He raised his hat when passing Rastrelli’s Smolny complex, and called Cameron’s buildings ‘as splendid as they are original’. Quarenghi’s Currency Bank between Sadovaya Street and the Catherine Canal is a horseshoe-shaped Palladian structure embracing a simple, six-pillared central building enlivened by precariously placed statues, mounted at the apexes of the pediment. Altogether more sober is the unadorned Ionic portico of the Academy of Sciences building, which stands adjacent to the Kunstkammer on Vasilevsky Island. Quarenghi was prolific. He built the English Reformed Church and the Institute for the Education of Noble Girls in the Smolny and designed houses for the nobility, such as the Gargarin Palace on the Neva and the Yusopov Palace on the Fontanka. Catherine wrote to Grimm that ‘the whole town is stuffed with his buildings’96 not least among them, the important Hermitage Theatre, which was clearly influenced by Palladio’s late Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza.
If The Bronze Horseman has become a manifestation of the spirit of St Petersburg, no building is more expressive of the city’s ostentatious majesty than the Winter Palace, which – like the capital itself – developed, in fits and starts, to become the composite structure that stands today. Between the founding of the city and the end of Catherine’s reign there were five incarnations of the Winter Palace standing on the site of Rastrelli’s impressive edifice. After his completion of the landmark structure, several architects worked to enlarge and refine the complex. De la Mothe and Felten designed the Small Hermitage and decorated its apartments overlooking the Neva, where Catherine and her twenty maids of honour lived – rooms that were lost in the great fire of December 1837, Most importantly, a gallery overlooking the interior hanging garden was constructed for Catherine’s rapidly enlarging trove – a picture collection which would grow to become one of the most significant in the world.
Despite his preference for scientific artefacts and specimens, Peter the Great had started an imperial picture collection in the first decades of the century, prompted by his understandable enthusiasm for Dutch marine artists. Fifty years later, Catherine decided to enlarge the collection substantially with a streak of extravagant, high-profile and often politically pointed purchases. The empress began in 1764, with the 255 canvases belonging to Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky, a Berlin art dealer. The Russian Ambassador to Berlin secured the collection that Frederick the Great desired, but had been unable to purchase. The Seven Years War had left him impoverished, and Catherine’s ease of acquisition was something of a snub.97
Just as philosophes like Diderot amassed an encyclopaedia full of knowledge, so Catherine wished to accumulate art. With agents scattered all over Europe and an imperial purse, the empress gratified her dreams of cultural grandeur. She was perfectly candid – ‘It is not love of art, it is voracity. I am not an amateur, I am a glutton.’98 With feigned humility, she classed herself as a professional ignoramus and admitted that she relied on the taste of people such as Melchior Grimm and her ambassadors in Europe. She depended on connoisseurs such as Count Stroganov and her Grand Chamberlain, Ivan Shuvalov, who – Catherine said – ‘are both members of at least 24 academies’.99 Stroganov owned one of the best art collections in Europe, as well as a library of 10,000 volumes. These were available for loan, a scheme that led to the building of the Imperial Russian Public Library on the Nevsky Prospekt between 1796 and 1801. Its collection of more than half a million volumes and manuscripts opened to the public in 1814.
Purchasing art in Paris towards the end of the eighteenth century depended on influence and inside information, for there were no commercial galleries – only an intermittent Salon of Living Artists held in the Louvre. Between 1759 and 1771 Diderot was the critic of those Salons, and his knowledge and connections helped Catherine obtain works by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Claude-Joseph Vernet and the great still-life and genre painter, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin.100 Her ambassador to France, Prince Dmitry Golitsyn, visited studios, commissioning new works as well as acquiring existing paintings. It was through such a network that in 1766 – Catherine obtained paintings left by a close friend of Chardin, the painter Jacques Aved, whose success as a portraitist had given him the wherewithal to assemble a good collection of Flemish and Dutch art. From Louis-Jean Gaignat-the renowned collector and secretary to Louis XV – Catherine’s agents bought forty-six paintings, including five Rubens. Once again the empress outbid the cash-strapped Frederick the Great when she purchased 6,000 drawings and some Dutch and Spanish canvases at a sale of the Count Karl Cobenzl collection in Brussels in 1768. The following year, Catherine acquired 600 Flemish, Dutch and Fr
ench paintings from the Polish-Saxon diplomat and collector Count Heinrich von Brühl – the haul including Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Scholar and Watteau’s An Embarrassing Proposal, along with works by Rubens, Cranach and Tiepolo.
Collecting with a vast purse was not difficult, but the logistics of acquisition sometimes were. In July 1771, Catherine obtained items from the estate auction of the deceased Dutch distiller, timber merchant and collector Gerrit Braamcamp, including some important Dutch paintings by Paulus Potter, Philips Wouwer-man and Gerard Terborch. These and other artefacts were loaded aboard a Dutch two-master, the Vrouw Maria, which set sail for St Petersburg on 5 September 1771 – part of a cargo that included a vast quantity of sugar, cotton, indigo, thread, mercury and madder. A month later, seemingly carried off-course by a storm, the ship ran aground off the Finnish island of Jurmo. She managed to refloat, but was beached again, this time losing her rudder. The Vrouw Maria was then dislodged by a large wave and started taking water. At dawn on 4 October, the crew abandoned ship and were rescued. They tried to salvage what they could, but were hampered by spillage from the cargo clogging the bilge pumps. Five days later, the Vrouw Maria sunk in forty-one metres, with Catherine’s canvases on board. The fact that the Russian Foreign Minister, Nikita Panin, despatched Major Their to attempt a salvage suggests that the canvases were known to have been rolled and sealed before the ship set sail. Major Their returned without the paintings. In fact it was not until 1999 with modern archival research, side-scan sonar and divers using compressed air and trimix breathing gas – that the sunken wreck was located. Obviously benefiting from its sojourn at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, with its low levels of corrosive salt, the hold was found to be full of cargo and the hull intact. In 2008, there were Russian and Finnish plans to mount a salvage operation, but —so far – there has been no recovery of the twenty-seven paintings on board.101
They were a mere drop in the ocean. A year earlier Catherine bought 100 paintings from the Swiss banker François Tronchin in Geneva and in 1772 took delivery of seventeen packing cases full of 400 paintings, which Dmitry Golitsyn bought for the empress on Diderot’s advice. This was the collection of Pierre Crozat who died in 1740, and which came on the market after the death of his nephew, Baron de Thiers.102 It included two Danaës – one by Rembrandt, one by Titian – a Bacchus by Rubens, Giorgione’s Judith and Raphael’s Holy Family, which was later sold to the United States by a cash-strapped early Soviet government.103 As for Rembrandt’s Danaë, that was slashed and doused in sulphuric acid by an embittered Lithuanian in 1985. The acid dissolved the glazes, obliterating detail104 but after twelve years of restoration, the painting was hung once again on the walls of the Hermitage Museum.
To consider the rapid manner in which the Hermitage Collection was put together is to plunge into the kind of statistical vaunt beloved of tour guides, although even Catherine was delighted by the magnitude of her acquisitions. Writing to Grimm in 1790, she boasted, ‘My museum in the Hermitage – not counting the paintings and the Raphael loggias – consists of 3,800 books, four rooms filled with books and prints, 10,000 engraved gems, approximately 10,000 drawings and a natural science collection that fills two large halls.’105 A Soviet-era guide bragged that on 1 January 1972, the ‘museum’s displays and store rooms contain about 2,650,000 works of art and other objects’.106 Today the figure is placed at around three million items. If you were to spend a meagre minute with each exhibit, it would take you 50,000 hours, or 2,000 days, or more than five and a half years of viewing – and that’s without counting the time for moving about the museum’s 353 halls. Italian art alone occupies thirty-seven of those rooms.
The first step towards the creation of this great institution was taken in the 1770s, when it became clear that space was needed to display Catherine’s rapidly expanding collection. Building along from the Winter Palace towards the Winter Canal, Yuri Felten designed the three-storey Large Hermitage, which was completed in 1776. Viewing the collection at this stage, the Dutch physician Pieter van Wonzel noted that there ‘was a good deal of mediocrity’107 – understandable when you bulk-buy. The French chargé d’affaires, the Chevalier de Corberon, found Catherine’s gallery ‘too narrow’ and a good number of the pictures ‘badly displayed’ – not that the hanging in the Louvre during the late eighteenth century was exemplary, with paintings skied and crushed side by side.
In the late 1770s, after George III sent a gift of Benjamin West’s portrait of the Prince of Wales and his brother, Catherine acquired English works by Joseph Wright of Derby, Godfrey Kneller and the portraitist and Principal Painter to the Court of Charles II, Sir Peter Lely.108 Then – once again proving herself an opportunist in the face of the financial misfortune of others – Catherine purchased, for £43,000, Sir Robert Walpole’s old Houghton Hall collection from the ex-prime minister’s impoverished nephew. People were up in arms, just as they had been in France over the Tronchin sale. ‘Russia is sacking our palaces and museums,’ complained Josiah Wedgwood. Dr Johnson petitioned Parliament to block the export of a collection which included Poussin, Rubens and Rembrandt.109 Parliament – exhibiting its chronic talent for philistinism – refused John Wilkes’s proposal that the works be purchased by the state to form the foundation of a national collection. Thus Catherine added, among many other paintings, twenty Van Dykes, nineteen Rubens, eight Titians, three Veroneses, two Velazquez, a Raphael and a Poussin to her collection.110
At the beginning of the 1780s, the empress was advised that space and funds were becoming a problem and she curtailed her cupidity. Golitsyn’s last purchase on her behalf was in 1781 when he obtained 199 Dutch, Flemish, French and Italian paintings from the collection of Count Baudouin. By her death in 1796 Catherine possessed nearly 4,000 paintings, which were hung – according to the German academician Johann Gottlieb Georgi – not ‘in keeping with schools or painters’, but according to their emotional impact.
The empress collected painters as well as paintings. As Grand Duchess, she and Peter were painted many times by the German portrait painter Georg Christoph Grooth, who arrived in the Russian capital the year before Catherine and worked there until his death in 1749. Pietro Rotari was invited to paint at the Russian court, at a cost of 1,000 gold roubles in travelling expenses alone. After a brief visit in 1756, he returned to St Petersburg the year Catherine became empress, but died shortly after his arrival. Nonetheless, the imperial collection boasted 863 paintings by Rotari – many merely small portraits of coquettish young girls. Much later in Catherine’s reign, Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun fled the French Revolution and installed herself temporarily in Petersburg, where she produced a good number of portraits of the nobility in what could loosely be termed the English style.
An area of the Hermitage’s Pavilion Hall was set aside as a space where Russian artists such as Dmitry Levitsky and Vladimir Borovikovsky studied and copied the masters. Levitsky presented twenty canvases at the first exhibition of the Academy of Fine Arts, including a portrait of Diderot, who sat informally without a wig. This secured Levitsky’s reputation, a teaching post, and won him imperial commissions. As Professor of Portraiture at the Academy, he taught Borovikovsky, who in 1794 painted a portrait of the intelligent, no-nonsense Catherine walking a whippet in the park at Tsarskoe Selo. It presented an empress indulging the newly discovered love of nature in a landscaped park, in which a monument to Count Rumyantsev’s successes in the 1768-74 Russo-Turkish War is visible. Borovikovsky painted variations on this image, which became the source of a frequently reproduced engraving.
While painters were establishing a secure base for a Russian school, topographical engraving had come into its own during Elizabeth’s reign, when Mikhail Makhaev produced views and maps of St Petersburg in the early 1750s in honour of the fifty-year anniversary of the city’s founding. Makhaev’s raised points of view, and his use of an optical ‘camera’ with a wide-angled lens, intensified his perspective and dramatically dynamised and flattered the city.111 As a resu
lt of his success, a special class in topographical engraving was established at the Academy. Towards the end of Catherine’s reign, topographical painting came into its own notably in the work of Fedor Alekseev, who had been influenced by the views of Canaletto and other vedutisti during a sojourn in Venice. In Petersburg he painted the sweep of a surprisingly calm and uncluttered Neva lined with granite banks and impressive neoclassical buildings.
As Catherine’s enthusiasm for painting cooled, so her passion for the theatre increased. The building of Quarenghi’s Hermitage Theatre stimulated activity and, during the last decade of her life, she wrote six opera libretti, aided by her personal secretary, Krapovitsky. The new theatre was used both for Grands Hermitages – splendid performances for visiting dignitaries – and for the more modest Petits Hermitages, for the empress’s close friends. The elaborate spectacle of all-singing, all-dancing Italian opera was gradually being displaced by a taste for French opéra comique, in which the score was less important than the libretto. Catherine’s own plots were wide-ranging and were set by celebrated foreign composers, such as the handsomely paid Spaniard, Vincente Martin y Soler, as well as by native composers who rose to the challenge. Vasily Pashkevich produced an impressive Mozartean score for Catherine’s Fevey, which tackled the theme of filial responsibility and was presented in a lavish production at the Hermitage Theatre in April 1786, The empress addressed the necessity for strong leadership in The Brave and Bold Knight, and, in Kosometovich, The Woeful Knight she penned a satire on Gustav III of Sweden, with whom, in 1789 – the year of the opera’s creation – she was at war. In other works the empress used Russian fairy tales and folklore, a decision that appears to have influenced the evolution of Russian opera.112 Had Potempkin succeeded in his attempts to persuade Mozart to work in St Petersburg, the future of Russian opera might have been profoundly changed.113
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