In 1770, Geneva-based collector François Tronchin, whose own paintings had just left for St. Petersburg, alerted Denis Diderot of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Louis-Antoine Crozat, Baron de Thiers, who’d inherited one of France’s most valuable painting collections, had died in Paris. His three married daughters were interested in selling their inheritance. Diderot quickly dispatched Tronchin to Paris to examine hundreds of the Crozat paintings and assemble a catalogue.
Before an auction could take place, Diderot went to work, cleverly playing the heiresses against one another and suggesting their best option was to sell the entire collection en bloc. In October 1771, after nearly a year of secret negotiations, Baron de Thiers’s daughters accepted Diderot’s offer. In January 1772, in the presence of a notary, Diderot signed a contract on Catherine’s behalf, paying 460,000 livres for 500 works. The sensational deal elevated Catherine to the upper echelon of art collectors.
Among the disappointed collectors was London’s Sir Joshua Reynolds, who had his eye on Crozat’s five oil sketches by Peter Paul Rubens. “Last summer I went to Paris for a month in order to buy some of the Crozat collection but the Empress of Russia has bought the whole together for 18,000 £ which I think is not above half of what they would have sold for by auction,” wrote Reynolds.1 Just one Crozat masterwork escaped Catherine’s grasp. Maintaining her family was descended from the Stuarts, Madame du Barry, Louis XV’s last official mistress, snapped up Anthony van Dyck’s Portrait of Charles I.
Crozat’s art collection was considered the finest in France after those of the king and regent. Catherine’s clandestine deal sparked outrage in Paris, and there was doubt whether authorities would allow the pictures to leave the country. Catherine enlisted Diderot and his fellow philosophes to lobby on her behalf. The Marquis de Marigny, superintendent of royal buildings and Madame de Pompadour’s brother, pleaded with Louis XV to buy Crozat’s finest French pictures. But Louis refused and the marquis was unable to stop the sale.
In thanks for the extraordinary paintings, Catherine sent Diderot and François Tronchin sable furs “for lining clothes.” Unfazed by the firestorm he’d ignited, Diderot wrote his patroness: “I arouse the most genuine public hatred, and do you know why? Because I send you pictures. The connoisseurs are screaming, the artists are screaming, the rich are screaming. In spite of all these screams and screamers, I carry on the same as ever. . . .” In a letter to Falconet, Diderot noted Russia’s political ascendancy: “The collectors, the artists and the rich are all up in arms. I am taking absolutely no notice . . . so much the worse for France, if we must sell our pictures in time of peace, whereas Catherine can buy them in the middle of a war. Science, art, taste and wisdom are traveling northward and barbarism and all it brings in its train, is coming south.”2
The contentious acquisition wasn’t lost on Voltaire, who wrote Catherine in March 1772: “Madame, I am well aware that you are no supporter of iconoclasm since you are buying paintings.” “Like the [Byzantine] Empress Theodora I do love icons; but I like them to be well painted,” Catherine replied, “she kissed hers, whereas I do not.”3 With controversy still roiling, the Crozat pictures were packed into seventeen large wooden crates at the family’s Place Vendôme and transferred to the Louis XV Bridge (today’s Concorde Bridge). Despite Diderot’s protests, the masterworks sat in a riverfront warehouse for three months waiting for the Hirondelle to get a full cargo. It was the beginning of May before the pictures set off down the Seine, and July before they put out to sea.
After the fate of the sunken Bramkaamp pictures the previous fall, the arrival of the paintings in stormy St. Petersburg that November was cause for celebration. Two-thirds of the collection was Italian, including masterpieces like Raphael’s Holy Family and St. George and the Dragon (previously owned by England’s Charles I), Giorgione’s Judith, a Titian Danae, and a Pieta by Paolo Veronese. Among the Flemish and Dutch gems were Rembrandt’s Danae and The Holy Family, Rubens’s Bacchus and Portrait of a Lady-in-Waiting to the Infanta Isabella, plus half a dozen portraits by Rubens’s star assistant, Anthony van Dyck (including a wonderful early self-portrait). From France came works by Poussin, Antoine Watteau (Actors of the Comedie Francaise), and Jean-Siméon Chardin (The Laundress).
The man responsible for Catherine’s splendid new pictures was Baron de Thiers’s immensely wealthy and obsessive uncle, Pierre Crozat. Born in Toulouse in 1665, Pierre Crozat became France’s third richest man, amassing an estimated fortune of eight million livres (over 64 million dollars today).4 Pierre was nicknamed “Crozat the poor”—a tongue-in-cheek reference to his even wealthier older brother Antoine, worth 20 million livres and ennobled as the Marquis du Châtel. Antoine had also joined the bureaucracy as a financier and tax collector, becoming a financial backer to Louis XIV’s nephew and France’s regent, Philippe d’Orléans. With spectacular results, Antoine invested in highly speculative ventures in military supplies and overseas trade; he enjoyed a personal monopoly over exports and imports between France and French Louisiana.
Like Antoine, Pierre Crozat moved to Paris, where he bought himself a position as assistant to the Receveur Général du Clergé, the wealthy, well-connected Pierre-Louis Reich de Pennautier. From Pennautier, Crozat learned how to maximize his personal gain from collecting taxes from the clergy. But Crozat was caught lining his pockets. Instead of succeeding his mentor, Crozat was expelled from the treasury in 1708. The scandal ended Crozat’s political career, but not his role in the city’s cultural life.
In 1703, Pierre Crozat had bought eight blocks, a total of nearly two and a quarter acres, at the north end of rue de Richelieu in the Montmartre quarter, home to the royal library and stock market. The following year, he hired architect Jean-Silvain Cartaud to build a Roman-style palazzo to show off his growing art collection. The Crozat’s newly created coat of arms—silver chevrons and three silver stars—topped the residence’s enormous double doors. A series of increasingly elegant rooms furnished with André Charles Boulle’s marquetry furniture led to an opulent mirrored gallery spanning the entire width of the house.
It was there, ensconced on a dozen red leather sofas and surrounded by marble busts and bronzes, that Crozat and his guests savored his showiest paintings. Beneath the ceiling painting, the Birth of Minerva by history painter Charles de La Fosse, Crozat hung sixteen pictures on red silk damask walls. Among them were Tintoretto’s Birth of John the Baptist and Veronese’s Finding of Moses, a Rembrandt, a pair of Rubenses, and a trio of van Dycks. Rather than arrange the works by nationality or subject, Crozat mixed various schools together to maximize their effect. French windows opened onto the formal manicured gardens featuring tiered lawns and colorful flowerbeds.
Directly behind the densely hung Red Cabinet, a small staircase led upstairs to Crozat’s private second-floor apartments. Inspired by the 16th-century Medici Tribuna at the Uffizi in Florence, Crozat added a glass-domed octagonal study decorated by La Fosse and sculptor Pierre Legros. Here he kept his prized Rubens and Michelangelo drawings and over one hundred terra-cotta modelli and small bronzes. Most important was his beloved engraved gem collection arranged in two handsome marquetry chests. Connoisseur and print dealer Pierre-Jean Mariette likened his friend’s gem obsession to “a jealous and passionate lover who cannot be apart from his loved one . . .”5 More treasures resided nearby in the small blue satin Cabinet Crozat where Titian’s Danaë hung opposite Rembrandt’s Danaë, along with Raphael’s gem-like St. George and the Dragon and Holy Family.
In November 1714, just before becoming regent, Philippe II, Duke of Orléans (Philippe the Debauched), dispatched Crozat to Rome to negotiate the purchase of paintings from the cash-strapped heirs of Prince Livio Odescalchi. The Prince had inherited part of the art collection of Sweden’s Queen Christina, built on war booty from the sacks of Munich and Prague during the Thirty Years’ War. The Prague trove included paintings amassed by Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, another obsessive collector. After Christina’s death, the pictures were sold to Odescalchi in 1696 by her heir, the Marquis Pompeo Azzolini.
Prince Livio’s heirs rejected Crozat’s initial offers of 60,000 and 75,000 Roman ecus. It would take five more years before Crozat secured the 260 paintings for his royal client for 95,000 ecus. But the shipment of the canvases to the Duke of Orléans’s gallery at the Palais Royal had to wait until the death of Pope Clement in 1721. The pontiff prohibited the paintings from leaving Rome, believing them too important to the city’s cultural patrimony. (After the French Revolution, Louis Philippe d’Orléans [Philippe Égalité] sold over five hundred family paintings to an aristocratic English consortium led by Francis Egerton, 3rd Duke of Bridgewater.)
The Italy trip was a defining moment for Pierre Crozat’s own art collection. As part of his commission for the Odescalchi picture deal, Crozat received one hundred drawings from France’s royal collection. Like Austria’s Cobenzl and Saxony’s Brühl, Crozat fell in love with drawings. His Old Master drawing collection featured some 160 sheets by Raphael, along with works on paper by Michelangelo, Titian, Dürer, and Poussin. Through his diplomatic and ecclesiastical contacts in Rome and Venice and agents in Paris, Ghent, Amsterdam, and London, Crozat began buying paintings. Seeking social status, Crozat coveted pictures with illustrious provenances like the Medicis, Duke of Mantua, Charles I, and Cardinals Antonio Barberini, Richelieu, and Mazarin.
Crozat turned his elegant home into a private museum, brimming with some 500 paintings, 350 sculptures, 19,000 drawings, 1,400 engraved gems, Chinese and Japanese porcelains, Italian ceramics, tapestries, silver, and a pair of Egyptian mummies. Each Sunday afternoon, collectors and artists met in the first floor salon to discuss art theory and contemporary painting. From there, they continued upstairs to study their host’s drawings and paintings.
Styling himself after Renaissance art patron Lorenzo de’ Medici, Crozat rolled out the welcome mat for a number of artists. Charles de La Fosse and royal decorator Gilles-Marie Oppenord enjoyed rooms for a number of years; sculptor Pierre Le Gros stayed with Crozat when visiting Paris in 1715. Of all Crozat’s houseguests, the most famous was Jean-Antoine Watteau. Like another frequent guest, François Boucher, Watteau copied his patron’s artworks. Crozat commissioned Watteau to paint the four seasons to decorate the walls of his dining room (the only surviving oval is Ceres, Roman goddess of the harvest, at the National Gallery of Art, Washington). It may have been at Château de Montmorency, Crozat’s country estate north of Paris, that Watteau conceived his flirtatious paintings known as fête galantes.
Crozat was also patron to a new generation of Venetian artists that included Rosalba Carriera, Sebastiano Ricci and his nephew Marco Ricci, and decorative painter Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini. In the spring 1720, Carriera accepted Crozat’s invitation to be his guest in Paris. In her diary, the 44-year-old records the talents she met at Crozat’s home, like portraitist Hyacinthe Rigaud, Chardin, Boucher, and Louis-Michel van Loo. Along with commissioning some dozen pastels from Carriera along with portraits of his brother and niece, Crozat entertained the artist in high style, escorting her to the opera and ballet and presenting her with lavish gifts that included a silver dressing table set by goldsmith Thomas Germain.6
In Recueil Crozat, the first comprehensive history of major European art collections, Crozat ranked himself alongside the art-loving king of Spain and Rome’s Barberini family. Co-authored by Mariette, the two volumes featured engravings, along with artist biographies, text, and provenances. Crozat kept his unmatched drawings collection, assembled over fifty-five years, in 202 folios organized by period, school, artist, iconography, and size. At the end of his life, desperately wanting his drawings to stay in France, Crozat offered them to Louis XV for 100,000 livres. Cardinal Fleury foolishly turned down the exquisite trove, stating, “The king already had enough clutter without adding more.”7 In 1740, the 77-year-old bachelor died after a long illness. His small dog was curled beside his bed in a basket lined in red silk; expensive garments filled his wardrobes, along with his curled wigs and a dozen pairs of slippers.
Per Crozat’s wishes, Mariette sold his celebrated drawings at auction to benefit Paris’s poor. Ironically, many of the best works on paper—including pen and ink works by Raphael—were bought for the royal cabinet and are now part of the Louvre collection. Crozat bequeathed his five hundred pictures and Paris residence to his nephew, Louis-François Crozat, Marquis du Châtel. After Louis-François’s death a decade later (1750), the pictures were divided among his three heirs. A few pictures went to his elder brother, Joseph-Antoine Crozat, Baron de Tugny. The lion’s share of the magnificent paintings made a short trip north of the Tuileries Gardens to the Place Vendôme (today’s Ritz Hotel), the elegant home of the marquis’s younger brother, Louis-Antoine Crozat, Baron de Thiers. Louis XV was among the guests who visited the baron’s prestigious gallery.
About thirty of Crozat’s paintings that arrived at the Winter Palace were true masterpieces. Among the most exquisite was Judith, then attributed to Raphael. But in his compendium, Mariette observed that the vivid colors, soft flesh tones, and landscape were executed according to Giorgione’s taste and principles.8 According to Mariette, Judith had been brought from Italy to France in the later part of the 17th century, eventually sold to Parisian collector Pierre-Vincent Bertin from whom Pierre Crozat purchased it around 1711. Crozat had the narrow painting enlarged, adding nine-centimeter-wide strips to both sides.
In the mid 19th century, Crozat’s extensions were removed; at the end of the century Judith was transferred from its wood panel to canvas. But controversy continued over the painting’s attribution. In the 1864 Hermitage catalogue, the picture was attributed to Moretto da Brescia.9 In 1901, Bernard Berenson pronounced Judith an “excellent and invaluable copy” of a lost original by Giorgione, an artist he describes as “more than the rival of Raphael in idyllic charm, the companion of Leonardo in subtlety and refinement . . . and, for sheer energy, almost the peer of Michelangelo.”10 Estonian art connoisseur Karl von Liphart finally confirmed Mariette’s hunch—Judith was one of just a handful of authenticated works by Giorgione.
Called the equal of Leonardo and Correggio by Vasari, Giorgione remains one of the most mysterious figures in Western painting. Though he died in his early thirties, possibly contracting the plague from his mistress, the Venetian’s lyrical landscapes had a tremendous influence on successive generations of artists. It was early in his short career, around 1504, that Giorgione painted the popular Old Testament heroine. As the story goes, the beautiful Israelite widow went into the enemy camp of Assyrian commander Holofernes to win his confidence. During a banquet, Holofernes became drunk, and later Judith seized his sword and cut off his head, saving the Jewish people. Rather than depicting Judith killing Holofernes, Giorgione depicts her with flowers surrounding her head, in a diaphanous pink robe, sword in hand, glancing down at his bloody head beneath her foot. “. . . [S]he looks at the head with as gracious a smile as if it were a fragrant flower at her feet,” wrote Bernard Berenson.11
Hermitage conservators discovered traces of hinges that may have once covered a keyhole. A rectangular piece of wood had been inserted and painted over on the right side and slightly under the center of the canvas. It turns out that Giorgione, like his Venetian colleagues Bellini, Veronese, and Titian, produced art to decorate furniture. A highly popular genre in 16th-century Venice, these works adorned everything from armoires and beds to doors and musical instruments. According to Susannah Kathleen Rutherglen, Giorgione’s heroine decorated a cabinet door for books or precious objects—either alone on a cabinet, or possibly alongside a pendant of David, Judith’s frequent partner in Renaissance art.12 With the surge in popularity of easel pictures in the 17th century, many Venetian ornamental paintings were removed from their furniture surrounds and turned into independent artworks. Pierre Crozat bought one such picture.