On September 1, 1778, Catherine sent Melchior Grimm an uncharacteristically melodramatic letter: “I’ll die, I’m sure I’ll die: there’s a strong wind blowing from the sea, the worst kind for the imagination; this morning I went to the baths, which made my blood rise to my head, and this afternoon the ceilings of the Raphael loggias fell into my hands. I am sustained by absolutely nothing but hope; I beg you to save me: write at once to Reiffenstein, I beg you, to tell him to get these vaults copied life-size, as well as the walls, and I will make a vow to Saint Raphael that I will have loggias built whatever the cost and will place the copies in them, for I absolutely must see them as they are. I have such veneration for these loggias, these ceilings, that I am prepared to bear the expense of this building for their sake, and I will have neither peace nor repose until this project is under way.”
Catherine added a practical request: “And if someone could make me a little model of the building, the dimensions taken with accuracy in Rome, the city of models, I would get nearer to my aim. Well, the divine Reiffenstein could have this lovely commission as well, if Monsieur the Baron Grimm so desires; I admit that I would rather charge you with this than Monsieur Shuvalov [Empress Elizabeth’s former lover], because the latter is always raising doubts about everything, and doubts are what make people like me suffer more than anything else in the world.”1
By November, scaffolding was up at the Vatican.
What fell into Catherine’s lap that blustery fall afternoon was an exquisite book of hand-colored engravings of the Vatican’s Raphael Loggia. Catherine received Giovanni Volpato’s engravings in early 1776 as a gift from Count Nikolai Repnin, her Constantinople-based ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Volpato, the Bassano-born, Venice-trained son of an embroiderer, was considered one of the great masters of etching. Smitten with Raphael and Rome, Catherine found Volpato’s engravings irresistible. Known as “Raphael’s Bible,” the vaulted gallery reflected Renaissance Italy’s rediscovery of the classical world—the same revival sweeping 18th-century Europe. Catherine wasn’t the first ruler to replicate a masterwork. For his villa at Tivoli, Roman Emperor Hadrian had copied the temple of Aphrodite of Knidos, shrine of the Praxiteles masterpiece. France’s Louis XIV adorned a gallery at Tuileries after the interior of the gallery of Annibale Carracci’s 1598 Palazzo Farnese.2 Catherine saw the Vatican replica as part of her program to turn St. Petersburg into a second Rome, symbol of early Christianity and imperial power. “Oh, Rome! Rome!” she enthused. “The rest of the world cannot compete with you in the arts, in the ruins and in many other things.”3
Per Catherine’s instructions, Melchior Grimm consulted Johann Friedrich Reiffenstein, her well-connected Rome art dealer. Reiffenstein’s choice for the project was Christopher Unterberger, a Tyrolian-born artist specializing in decorative Renaissance-style painting who’d worked on the restoration of the loggia. Unterberger had also collaborated with neoclassical painter Anton Raphael Mengs on an elaborate ceiling for the Vatican Library’s Papyrus Room decorated with Roman fresco motifs. That led to commissions to decorate Pius VI’s residences and the Museo Pio-Clementino, started during the pontificate of Clement XIV.
Along with a lucrative payment, the prestigious commission from Russia offered Unterberger a chance to expand his reputation internationally. But his new patroness couldn’t have her loggia soon enough. Six months into the project, Catherine wrote: “The slightest indigestion of the Holy Father sends me into agonies, for a conclave would delay the work tremendously.”4 Unterberger began by painting cartoons in the original size in tempera. From these cartoons, along with Volpato’s engravings, Unterberger’s team created large oil copies on canvas. Giovanni Battista Dalera, Felice Gianni, and Andrea Nessenthaler copied Old Testament scenes. Giovanni Angeloni and his son Vincenzo worked on the decorative elements. “When the sea opens at end of winter, at the start of the new year . . . a large quantity of pillars, vaults, and parts of the galleries will be ready to be shipped,” wrote Reiffenstein.5
By November 1779, Reiffenstein recommended Bergamo native Giacomo Antonio Domenico Quarenghi to design a gallery to house the replicas by Catherine’s Large Hermitage. Before Quarenghi left for St. Petersburg, Reiffenstein asked him to work up a blueprint for the loggia. As a model, Quarenghi consulted a cork model of the Vatican Loggia by Antonio Chichi. The artist’s detailed architectural recreations in cork—including a set of three dozen of ancient Rome’s great sites—had become prized collector’s items.
The original Vatican Loggia was also a collaborative effort. In 1508, after completing his famous series of Madonnas in Florence, 25-year-old Raphael was summoned to Rome by Pope Julius II. The irascible “warrior pope” was looking for an artist to decorate the middle room of his new state apartments along the north side of the Vatican Palace, known today as the Stanza. After well-known painters Perugina and Signorelli fell through, architect Donato Bramante convinced his patron to give young Raphael a chance. Raphael passed his test with flying colors with triumphs that included Julius II’s library (Stanza della Segnatura) and the magnificent School of Athens.
It didn’t take long before Raphael was dominating Rome’s artistic scene and competing with Michelangelo. “Heaven sometimes showers infinite riches on one sole favorite,” wrote Vasari, who called men like Raphael “mortal gods who leave such fame on earth that they may hope for sure rewards in heaven thereafter.”6 After five successful years, Raphael landed an even more enthusiastic papal patron—37-year-old Leo X. The second son of art-loving Medici ruler Lorenzo the Magnificent, Leo X devoted much of his papacy to the arts. When Bramante died the year after Leo X’s accession in 1513, the new pope appointed Raphael as his successor. As commissioner of antiquities, Raphael was responsible for conserving Roman antiquities and supervising excavations. Raphael also took over Bramante’s unfinished Loggia begun in 1512 on the third level of the Vatican Palace overlooking the Cortile San Damaso and St. Peter’s Square.
Approximately 215 feet long and 13 feet wide, the Loggia was designed to display Julius II’s antiquities. For the vaulted ceiling, Raphael chose fifty-two biblical episodes—forty-eight from the Old Testament and four from the New Testament. Each of the thirteen bays contained four frescoes—beginning with the Creation and ending with the Last Supper. With the exception of Moses who rated two vaults (eight paintings), each great biblical protagonist occupied one bay. Ten more biblical scenes in grisaille adorned the walls below the mirrors. Raphael’s inspiration came from a wide variety of pagan and Christian sources—including the Hellenistic Farnese Cup, antique reliefs and sculpture, and early Christian mosaics from Santa Maria Maggiore.7 He also consulted book and manuscript illustrations, sculpture, frescoes, and the great mosaic cycles of basilicas in Rome, Florence, and Venice.
To help him execute the commission quickly, Raphael turned to his accomplished group of painters, draftsmen, and sculptors. Raphael entrusted the first vault to his two most talented recruits, Roman Giulio Romano and Florentine Giovan Francesco Penni (the project’s superintendent). Most likely, Raphael sketched the important biblical figures, leaving his assistants to finish the scenes.8 To complement the ceiling, Raphael added stucco bas-reliefs and trompe l’oeil festoons of fruit and flowers. The frescoed humans and animals known as grotesques were inspired by the recently discovered paintings from the grotta, or caverns, of the Emperor Nero’s Golden House. A “mad extravagance” is how Roman historian Suetonius described Nero’s pleasure palace on Rome’s Palatine Hill. By Raphael’s day, the grotesques were all that remained of the sumptuous ancient decoration.
Though Vasari called grotesques “a very ridiculous and licentious species of painting,” he praised the birds, fish, and sea monsters in Raphael’s Loggia as the “most lovely and capricious inventions, full of the most varied and extravagant things you could possibly imagine.” For Giovanni da Udine, who’d trained in Giorgione’s Venice workshop, the Loggia offered a chance to express his wildest imagination.9 In creating his fantastic creatures, Udine turned to the ancient art of stucco. Unlike marble which required carving and chiseling, stucco could be modeled like clay and also colored.
The Loggia was an instant hit. Shortly before its completion in 1519, courtier Baldassar Castiglione raved to Isabella d’Este: “A loggia decorated with paintings and stucco in the style of antiquity . . . as beautiful as possible, and maybe more so than what one sees nowadays. . . .”10 As the finishing touches were being made, the first seven of Raphael’s spectacular tapestries depicting the Acts of the Apostles were being hung in the Sistine Chapel below Michelangelo’s celebrated ceiling. The ten-tapestry cycle set Leo X back 16,000 ducats—over five times Michelangelo’s fee for the glorious ceiling.
The following April, Raphael died suddenly on his thirty-seventh birthday. The cause of his death remains a mystery, though Vasari attributed it to “amatory excess.” During his funeral mass at the Vatican, Raphael’s altarpiece Transfiguration was placed at the head of the bier, finished by his colleague Giulio Romano. In just a dozen years, Raphael had gone from relative obscurity to a legend. England’s Henry VII, France’s Louis XIV, and Hapsburg emperor Charles V wanted to own his tapestries. In 1623, England’s Charles I paid 300 pounds for seven of Raphael’s Sistine Chapel cartoons. (In 1865, Queen Victoria loaned them to London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, where they remain.) Raphael and his Loggia inspired generations of artists; by the time of Catherine’s reign, he was widely regarded as Western art’s greatest painter.
Catherine showed a keen interest throughout the decade-long loggia project. “I am fascinated by the replica of the Raphaelian Logge, and I just cannot stay away from them. . . .”11 In May 1779, Catherine wrote Grimm about the arrival of the copy of two pillars. “Thank God and thanks to divine Rieffenstein and to painter Unterpeger . . . the two are already finished.”12 Safe passage of the Vatican replicas became a real concern as war made the high seas increasingly dangerous. In February 1780, a Russian ship loaded with grain for Malaga was seized by the Spanish, who suspected the cargo was bound for Gibraltar (which the Spanish were trying to recapture from Britain).
Catherine ordered fifteen ships fitted for service in Spanish waters, but made it clear to British envoy Harris that she had no intention of entering the war. In a letter to Grimm days later announcing her Armed Neutrality declaration, Catherine revealed that the transport of her art acquisitions was a top priority. “You will hear one of these days that a certain declaration has been issued which you will probably find truly volcanic,” she wrote. “There was nothing else to do. . . . This spring and during the summer a number of Russian vessels will touch Livorno and they may even bring home the Raphaels.”13
Catherine’s order generated great interest in Rome. By the end of August 1780, Christopher Unterberger transferred the first part of the commission to the Quirinale, where the paintings were displayed for the public and Pope Pius VI. Seven years later, Goethe wrote admiringly of another installment with the paint still fresh. Beginning in 1782, the copies were rolled up, transported to Livorno, and loaded onto a Russian ship for St. Petersburg. On the south wall of Quarenghi’s Loggia, against a blue background, Catherine replaced Leo X’s Medici family coat of arms with her profile portrait and Russia’s double-headed eagle.
Catherine’s passion for Raphael didn’t end with the Loggia. When Paul remarried in September 1776, Catherine threw an engagement party at Tsarskoe Selo. In preparation for the gala, Catherine asked to have her future daughter-in-law’s bedroom decorated with a tapestry with golden thread and gold and blue velvet border inspired by drawings of the Raphael Loggias. Also at Tsarskoe Selo, Catherine had Yury Velten build a mini Stanza di Raphael, a small room to be decorated with twenty-six original engravings from the Loggia. In a 1781 letter to Grimm, Catherine shared that of two of eleven newly decorated rooms were dedicated to “Raphaelism.” Though Catherine rejected Reiffenstein’s idea to commission more copies of Raphael’s works for these rooms, she authorized him to obtain a pattern with motifs by Raphael to be made in the experimental encaustic technique.
In 1784, Prince Nicholas Yusupov, Catherine’s newly appointed plenipotentiary minister in Italy, discussed his proposal to copy Raphael’s frescoes of the Stanza with Vatican officials. Though Catherine agreed, the project was never executed. Yusupov also suggested Catherine buy copies of Raphael’s cartoons for the Sistine Chapel tapestries that belonged to England’s Royal Collection, as well as copies of his tapestries whose cartoons had been lost. But by this point, Catherine’s taste seems to have shifted from Renaissance painting to the new fashion for ancient Roman painting sparked by the discovery of the Domus area at Pompeii. As a collector, Catherine was also leaning toward more cheerful subjects. “I cannot imagine what they are like, but if their subject matter is sad or too solemn, I am not interested in them,” she wrote.14