THE BRIGHTEST STAR OF THE NORTH
Catherine no longer had to hide her relationship with Gregory Orlov and installed him in the Winter Palace in an upstairs apartment connected to hers by a private staircase. But rumors persisted about how she came to the throne. Peter’s sudden death after just six months in power led to widespread speculation about Catherine’s involvement. Few believed her court’s official press release: “. . . We received the news to our great sorrow and affliction that it was God’s will to end the life of the former emperor Peter III by a severe attack of hemorroidal colic.” Catherine went on to ask her 20 million subjects to “bid farewell to his earthly remains without rancor and to offer up prayers for the salvation of his soul.”1
Even supporters like Count Nikita Panin, who expected Catherine to rule as regent for her young son Paul, learned she had no intention of sharing power with the sickly eight-year-old. On top of this, Catherine was soon suspected of complicity in the 1764 murder of Ivan VI—the former tsar who had been deposed and imprisoned since childhood by Empress Elizabeth. “The ways of God are wonderful beyond prediction,” a relieved Catherine wrote Panin on learning of the 22-year-old’s prison death. “Providence has given me a clear sign of its favor by putting an end to this shameful affair.”2
Paranoid about conspirators like herself, Catherine went to work shoring up allies in the Orthodox Church and the nobility. To buy support, she paid out 1.5 million rubles during the first six months of her reign. By the following spring, she had also gifted over 21,000 male serfs.3 Catherine showered her co-conspirators and supporters with titles, jewels, and property. Those who participated in the coup received silver services and medals with her portrait. Through a combination of gifts and charisma, Catherine won over Russia’s elite.
Working in Catherine’s favor was a tradition of Russian tsarinas. Catherine II was the last of four 18th-century female rulers, starting with Peter’s widow, Catherine I (1725–1727), followed by his niece Anna Ioannovna (1730–1740), and his daughter Elizabeth Petrovna (1741–1761). Anna Ioannovna had become tsarina unexpectedly after Peter the Great’s fourteen-year-old grandson Peter II died on the eve of his wedding. Famous for her big cheeks (which Thomas Carlyle compared to a Westphalian ham), she ruled for a decade before naming as her heir her nine-month-old great-nephew Ivan. Under the regency of his mother, Anna Leopoldovna, Ivan VI’s rule lasted less than two years. That’s when Peter the Great’s 32-year-old daughter Elizabeth seized power. After imprisoning the toddler tsar and his family and throwing away the key, Elizabeth proceeded to reign for two decades. In 1742, to insure that her father’s line continued to rule, the childless Elizabeth selected her German-born nephew, Peter of Holstein-Gottorp, as heir. Three years later, she chose Sophie Friederike Auguste of Anhalt-Zerbst, the future Catherine II, to be his bride.
While gender didn’t present an issue for Catherine in Russia, it was a huge problem in Europe, where she was caricatured as licentious and a regicide. The Hapsburgs had long banned female rule until Charles II passed a law that his daughter Maria Theresa could reign (she still shared the throne with her husband, Francis I, and later her son, Joseph II). As a non-Russian woman who appeared to have bumped off her husband, Catherine found herself in a precarious position. Without a legal claim to Russia’s throne, she quickly needed to find other ways to legitimize her reign. “To consolidate her newly acquired power, she [Catherine] had to establish her public credibility on foundations denied her by race, lineage or law,” writes historian Antony Lentin. “A good reputation was not just flattering to her ambition; it was essential to her security.”4
As a survival tactic, Catherine began promoting herself through the Enlightenment’s most influential leaders, cultivating relationships within the cosmopolitan, intellectual community known as the “Republic of Letters.” As Grand Duchess, Catherine had put her “eighteen years of boredom and seclusion” to good use. In addition to learning Russian and studying Russian history, Catherine devoured the works of the French philosophes who championed rational, secular government and enlightened absolutism by which rulers could improve their subjects’ lives.
Through long running correspondences in French—along with financial backing and gift giving—Catherine enjoyed great press with two of the Enlightenment’s most prominent thinkers, Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire and Denis Diderot. Both men sang Catherine’s praises throughout Europe. Diderot would become one of Catherine’s cleverest art scouts, negotiating some of her finest acquisitions. Their support gave Catherine intellectual and social clout, and helped polish her tarnished image internationally.
The month of Catherine’s coronation, Voltaire lauded her offer to print Denis Diderot’s thirty-two-volume Encyclopédie, then banned in France. “You are surely the brightest star of the north, and there has never been any as beneficent as you; Andromeda, Perseus, and Calisto are not your equal,” wrote Voltaire, signing his letter “Your temple-priest.”5 In 1765, Catherine won Diderot over by buying his library for an enormous sum and sending him fifty years of salary in advance for its custodianship. “. . . I am as emotional as a child, and the true expression of the feeling with which I am filled dies on my lips,” gushed Diderot. “. . . Oh Catherine! Remain sure that you rule as powerfully in Paris as you do in St. Petersburg.”6 Catherine did not succeed, however, in wooing Diderot’s colleague Jean d’Alembert to St. Petersburg as Paul’s tutor. Declining a generous salary, palace, and ambassador rank, the mathematician recalled Catherine’s press release about Peter III’s death: “I am also prone to hemorrhoids which in Russia is a severe complaint,” he wrote Voltaire; “I prefer to have a painful behind in the safety of my home.”7
Catherine’s letters to Voltaire seem spontaneous; in fact she worked hard on what Anthony Lentin calls “miniature masterpieces of artifice.”8 Unlike his dramatic falling out with Frederick the Great after an extended stay in Germany resulted in a strong mutual dislike, Voltaire never stopped supporting Catherine. His public praise increased despite Catherine’s aggressive foreign policy with Turkey and Poland. Flattered by Catherine’s attention and gifts, Voltaire hoped the empress would implement his ideas across Russia. “I love her to the point of madness” and “I am an old fool in love with Catherine” he wrote friends and heads of state. To Catherine he wrote, “You have inspired me with something of a romantic passion.”9
Another of Catherine’s lifetime correspondents was Frederic Melchior Grimm, a Parisianized German whose handwritten Correspondance literraire arrived twice a month. Grimm’s reports featured the latest literary gossip and artistic news, including Denis Diderot’s commentary on Paris exhibitions. Welcome in all the salons of Paris, Grimm provided Catherine cultural and social contacts. He soon became her closest adviser and propaganda agent, entrusted with everything from art acquisitions to selecting a wife for her son. Unlike Catherine’s carefully composed letters to Voltaire, her 1,500 letters to Grimm are highly personal and informal, with updates on her love life, the books she was reading, and her newest paintings.
Catherine’s image makeover wasn’t limited to her letter writing campaign. No woman sovereign since Elizabeth I distributed more portraits of herself. Like England’s queen, Catherine manipulated her image to communicate just how she wanted to be viewed—benevolent, enlightened, and cultured. Fully committed to self-advertising, Catherine saw that her idealized likeness graced everything from jeweled snuffbox covers, medals, and carved gems to oil paintings, sculpted portrait busts, and tapestries. Starting with state portraits to celebrate her accession, Catherine helped fashion her highly ritualized images.
Catherine believed her best asset was her likeability, not her looks. “. . . The truth is that I never considered myself very beautiful, but people like me, and that, I assume, is my strength,” she wrote.10 She expressed surprise when men like the Swedish ambassador found her beautiful. “I was tall and very well-built,” she recalled in her memoirs, “but I should have been more plump; I was rather thin. I preferred not to use powder, my hair was a beautiful chestnut colour, was very thick and well set . . .”11 On meeting Russia’s “sumptuously attired” empress for the first time, French envoy Count de Ségur confessed to be “so astounded by her majestic air, the grandeur and nobility of her bearing, her proud gaze and somewhat artificial pose that I became totally oblivious to everything else around me.”12
Catherine’s favorite portraits capture the charisma and confidence noted by contemporaries. Among her many coronation portraits, she liked Fedor Rokotov’s portrayal best. Using quick brushstrokes and a palette of silver-blues and brown-golds, the former serf managed to portray the empress as both regal and human, seated on her throne with a small crown on her head and orb beside her. Recognizing Rokotov’s talent, Catherine had him create six more of her portraits. The first of these went to Gregory Orlov, for which Catherine paid 500 rubles. Catherine also ordered enamel on copper copies of Rokotov’s portrait from court miniaturist Andrei Cherny to decorate snuffboxes, gifts to courtiers and foreign ambassadors.
More than any other artist, Vigilius Eriksen helped shaped Catherine’s public image. Producing some thirty portraits of the empress during his fifteen years in St. Petersburg, the Dane proved his claim that “a portrait painter is just as important at court as a painter of historical events.”13 Duplicates of his canvases were distributed throughout Europe, including the courts of Prussia, Denmark, and England. As a young artist, Eriksen had left Copenhagen for St. Petersburg in 1757 when the Danish Academy refused to include his portraits in competition. After Empress Elizabeth’s death in December 1761, he won favor with the young Grand Duchess with Portrait of Catherine in Mourning (Catherine hid her pregnancy with Gregory Orlov’s baby under her bulky black mourning robes). By showing Catherine paying tremendous respect to Elizabeth, the portrait proved an effective propaganda tool.
In Moscow at the time of Catherine’s coronation, Eriksen was granted a number of sittings. In Catherine II, Empress of Russia (c. 1765) he depicted his patroness from below, heightening the picture’s drama. Eriksen showed her regalia in splendid detail—from her ermine-trimmed robe and diamond-studded crown to the scepter, orb, and blue sash fastened at the hip with the blade of the Order of St. Andrew. To play up Catherine’s embrace of Russia, Eriksen included the crowned double-headed eagle in gold embroidery on her dress and in diamonds on her necklace. Catherine quickly commissioned duplicates for the courts of Europe. Catherine sat several times for Portrait of Catherine in Front of a Mirror (c. 1762–64), a fascinating glimpse into her private and public personas. Turning to face the viewer, a charming Catherine stands before a mirror in a silver embroidered dress, her head tilted, holding a fan. In contrast, Eriksen uses Catherine’s reflection in the mirror to capture her gravity and determination.
One of Catherine’s favorite paintings was Eriksen’s Portrait of the Empress on Her Horse Brilliant (1762). Sword in hand, Catherine sits atop her white horse, wearing the bright green and red uniform of the elite Preobrazhensky regiment, high black boots, and a gold-braided fur-trimmed black tricorn. The date of her coup, June 28, 1762, is carved on a tree to the left. “I put on a guards uniform and appointed myself a colonel, which was received with great enthusiasm,” Catherine wrote her former lover Stanislaus Poniatowski (future King of Poland). “I mounted my horse; we left only a few men from regiment to guard my son who remained in town. I then put myself at the head of the troops and the whole night we rode towards Peterhof.”14 Peter III abdicated the following day and Catherine proclaimed herself empress.
Like her predecessor Elizabeth, Catherine possessed both traditional male and female qualities. “I sooner had a man’s than a woman’s spirit, but I wasn’t mannish,” Catherine wrote in her memoirs, “because together with the mind and character of a man I had the appeal of a very pleasant woman.”15 Catherine loved Eriksen’s equestrian portrait and hung the original in the throne room at Peterhof Palace, where her husband had abdicated. She ordered multiple copies from Eriksen, who varied the size, format, and background details. Catherine hung a version of the painting flanked by Eriksen’s equestrian portraits of Gregory and Alexei Orlov at the Winter Palace. Catherine’s portraiture inspired Russia’s elite. Following her lead, members of the nobility sat for portraits and formed portrait galleries at their country estates and city palaces.
In addition to paintings, Catherine had herself depicted in sculpture, a medium that was enjoying a revival thanks to the antiquity craze known as neoclassicism. Among Catherine’s numerous marble portraits, the standouts are a group of vivid busts by Russian sculptor Fedot Shubin. Born in the northern White Sea region to a family of bone carvers, Shubin left at age nineteen for St. Petersburg where his talent was discovered by a family friend, polymath and writer Mikhail Lomonosov. After graduating with honors from the Academy of Fine Arts, Shubin traveled to Paris, where Diderot and Dmitry Golitsyn introduced him to sculptor Jean-Baptiste Pigalle. At Pigalle’s suggestion, Shubin began sculpting figures from paintings by Nicolas Poussin and Raphael. Later, in Rome, he studied the famous busts and statues of antiquity.
It’s there Shubin produced his first classically inspired portrait bust of Catherine, for which he probably used an engraving of one of Vigilius Eriksen’s portraits. In a subtle portrayal evoking Roman statuary, Shubin crowned Catherine with a laurel wreath, the ancient symbol of victory. Like the elegant women of classical antiquity, Catherine’s hair is pushed back to show her forehead. Back in St. Petersburg as court sculptor, Shubin created other portraits of the empress. Among his most popular later portraits was a 1783 marble bust and bas-relief of Catherine wearing a laurel wreath that was copied in bronze, gesso, and porcelain. Catherine gave a number of Shubin’s portrait busts as gifts, including a copy to her art-loving cousin, Sweden’s Gustav III.
Catherine’s iconography reflected her passion for history and antiquity. She loved to be depicted as Minerva, continuing a tradition dating back to Alexander the Great.16 Though Catherine wasn’t the first woman to be represented as the Roman goddess of war, wisdom, and the arts, she took the allegory to new heights. Classical imagery not only linked Russia to contemporary Europe, it suggested Russia’s ties to ancient Greece and Rome. Painters and sculptors portrayed Catherine as a laurel-crowned goddess in classical robes and sandals and a warrior in helmet and armor.
To mark her coronation, Catherine hired German-born medalist Johann Georg Waechter to coin a silver medal depicting her as Minerva in armor. The reverse side shows Catherine receiving a crown from a kneeling allegorical figure of Petersburg. Catherine sent gold versions of the medal as gifts to Voltaire and Diderot. On the fifth anniversary of her coronation, Catherine had goldsmith Jean Pierre Ador insert the medals into the lids of silver and gilt snuffboxes—gifts for her co-conspirators. The inscription in Russian read: “By God’s grace Catherine II Empress and Autocrat of all the Russias. Behold thy salvation.”
Catherine also had her portraits woven in silk. Among the owners of these tapestries was Voltaire, who wrote the empress about Princess Dashkova’s 1771 visit to his Swiss estate: “As soon as she entered the drawing-room, she noticed your portrait in mezzo-tint, embroidered in satin, and garlanded with flowers. . . . There must be some magic power in your image; for I saw Princess Dashkova’s eyes brim with tears as she looked at the portrait. She spoke to me about your Imperial Majesty for four whole hours, and it was as if she had only spoken for four minutes.”17
Sensitive to her German roots, Catherine also used portraiture to advertise her devotion to Russian tradition and the Orthodox Church. In 1767, after accepted the title “Mother of the Fatherland,” Vigilius Eriksen created a portrait of Catherine dressed in a sleeveless jacket with a fur border and a kokoshnik, the traditional Russian headdress. Italian artist Stefano Torelli followed this with a portrait of the tsarina wearing a magnificent pearl- and gem-adorned kokoshnik and veil, pearl earrings, bracelet, and elaborate pearl necklace.
Catherine managed her image carefully, instituting strict quality control. In 1766, she demanded that a version of Eriksen’s coronation portrait en route from St. Petersburg to Copenhagen’s Christianborg Castle make a long detour to Moscow so she could personally approve the canvas. Other pictures, like Torelli’s equestrian portrait, did not meet her exacting standards. “. . . In my opinion, there is a horse and a figure on the horse and I don’t like either, nor is the rest very good,” she wrote.18 Swedish portraitist Alexander Roslin created a full-length state portrait with Catherine dripping ermine and diamonds and pointing to a bust of Peter the Great, inscribed “That which was begun will be completed.” But in a letter to Melchior Grimm, Catherine complained that she looked like a “plain and boorish Swedish cook.”19 Catherine had Fedor Rokotov replace Roslin’s face with a more youthful version, while keeping the original figure and accessories.
Catherine’s reach was global. In today’s parlance, she encouraged her images to go viral, instructing Russia’s ambassadors to give her portraits away as gifts through their embassies. The first of many engravings of the empress was created after a profile portrait by Verona-born Pietro Antonio Rotari. Along with thousands of these engravings, original oil paintings and variants of the originals were circulated by the hundreds, making Catherine recognizable across the continent. “I’ve ordered that my portraits be bought from Eriksen at any cost,” Catherine wrote Grimm in 1778. “Furthermore, there are tons of them in my gallery that are being copied from the Roslin. Everyone will have one, and it’s all the same to me whether they have them or not. I swear all the portraits of my predecessors are mostly lying around in attics. I myself have two or three wardrobes filled with them.”20 Despite this comment, Catherine worked hard to market herself. The results were not always positive. As her army began aggressive military actions against Poland and Turkey, Catherine became the object of satire by British political cartoonists.
Throughout her rule, Catherine would update her official portrait, changing the imagery to reflect the current political environment. As W. Bruce Lincoln writes, Catherine “shone as sovereign, mother and goddess all rolled into one.”21 Significant events inspired new commissions—from her smallpox inoculation to Russia’s military victories against the Ottoman Empire. To mark the silver anniversary of her reign, Dmitry Levitsky produced the highly symbolic allegorical Portrait of Catherine II as Lawmaker in the Temple of Justice. Dressed in a toga with a laurel wreath on her head, Catherine is depicted as the priestess of Themis, burning poppies at an altar, symbolizing her self-sacrifices for Russia. At her feet are law books and the scales of justice, while an eagle lurks in the background. Levitsky’s work was widely celebrated, but Catherine’s head isn’t by the artist. It’s a copy of Fedor Rokotov’s original—the one she liked best.