Just months before the arrival of her two Italians, another architect arrived in St. Petersburg. “I have someone else besides Quarenghi and Trombara,” wrote Catherine, “his name is Cameron—he has spent many years in Rome studying architecture.”1 She had hired Charles Cameron based on his 1772 book The Baths of the Romans. Though he appeared in St. Petersburg having never actually constructed a building, his knowledge of Greek and Roman art and architecture won Catherine over. It didn’t hurt that the architect padded his resume, exaggerating his time in Rome and claiming to be the namesake of aristocratic Jacobean rebel Charles Cameron of Lochiel. “I am quite taken up at present with Mister Cameron, Scottish by nationality; Jacobite by persuasion, a great designer nourished on Antiquity and famous for his book on ancient baths,” she wrote Grimm on August 23, 1779.2
Little is known about Cameron’s career between his two years in Italy and departure for St. Petersburg a decade later. Born in London, he learned basic architecture from his father, Walter Cameron, a London mason and carpenter. After a seven-year apprenticeship in his father’s guild as a master carpenter, Cameron studied under Isaac Ware, an expert on Italian Renaissance architecture and translator of Andrea Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture. After Ware’s death, Cameron left for Rome to complete his mentor’s dream of publishing a revised edition of Palladio’s drawings. There, Cameron got permission to survey a number of ancient baths.
According to Frank Salmon, what Cameron thought were the Baths of Titus turn out to have been the Baths of Trajan, built on top of Nero’s Golden House on the Esquiline Hill. One room, famous today for its central vault image of Achilles at Scyros, would prove the most thrilling of Cameron’s excavations and would inspire his work for Catherine. “It was with great difficulty that I got into this room,” wrote Cameron. “I was obliged to cut a hole through the wall B and let myself down a rope, and afterwards to creep through a hold in the wall O, upon my hands and knees. It was nearly full of earth to the ceiling. . . . This room was painted, the top of the niche fluted, and in the flutes were painted trophies of musick.”3
Back in London in 1769, Charles Cameron published his research in English and French. But unlike fellow Scot Robert Adam, who’d returned from Rome and catapulted to success, Cameron failed to gain commissions. Instead, he sued his father for selling his books and busts. The elder Cameron was already in Fleet Prison for failing to pay his dues to the carpenters’ guild. For Cameron, Catherine’s invitation to Russia represented the opportunity of a lifetime—a chance to apply his knowledge of Roman architecture for an enthusiastic, well-funded client. Catherine rolled out the welcome mat, giving her new architect his own house at Tsarskoe Selo. He’d later marry a daughter of John Bush, Catherine’s English gardener. Except for a brief visit to England around 1800, Cameron would spend the rest of his life in Russia.
Though neoclassicism was Russia’s official architectural style, the exoticism of China continued to fascinate Catherine. “In the next world, when I see Caesar and Alexander and other old friends, I shall be sure to find Confucius . . . ,” she wrote Grimm. “I want to have a discussion with him.” Catherine read avidly about the Fast East. “Tell me, have you read the description of China in the three volumes published in Paris last year? Do you know that great little ruler Huan-Huan . . . whom Confucius served?” she asked Grimm.4 She instructed Russia’s ambassador in London to secure a replica of William Chambers’s pagoda at Kew’s Royal Botanic Gardens to serve as the centerpiece of a Chinese village at Tsarskoe Selo and had his book Designs of Chinese Buildings translated into Russian.
To Antonio Rinaldi and Yury Velten’s Chinese Village at Tsarskoe Selo, Cameron added additional living quarters and redesigned the pagoda, replacing the faience wall tiles with frescoes “in the Chinese taste.” To allow guests to stroll from the palace to the village, Cameron installed a series of four successive bridges over the canal. For the first stone bridge, Cameron created railings made of vases linked by a red coral-like grille; Chinese figures holding lanterns topped four pink granite pedestals. Brightly colored flowers and dragons, and roofs painted like golden fish scales were among his fantastic decorations.
In 1780, Catherine assigned Cameron to completely redo the Great Palace. The imperial compound had begun as a modest stone summer dacha and garden for Peter the Great’s second wife, Catherine I. Their daughter Elizabeth, who’d spent childhood and adolescence there, inherited the estate which she affectionately called “little homeland.” During the 1740s, Elizabeth refurbished the original residence and added a new wing. Four years after these additions were finished, she hired Francesco Rastrelli (architect of the Winter Palace) to design a new rococo palace.
The resulting Great Palace (renamed Catherine Palace after Catherine I at its bicentenary in 1910) embodied Rastrelli’s opulent baroque style, from the massive gilded and mirrored Great Hall to the extraordinary Amber Room. Rastrelli’s lavish furniture designs included a table “fashioned in the image of Babylon” that seated Elizabeth and 362 of her closest friends. Though Catherine used Rastrelli’s opulent staterooms to impress foreign visitors, she found the décor of his reception rooms and private apartments pretentious.
For the next four years, Cameron reorganized and redecorated three suites of rooms known as the First, Fourth, and Fifth Apartments. Having chosen to move her personal apartments to the south end of the palace, Catherine ordered the main palace staircase here demolished. Cameron relocated the staircase in mahogany to the center of the palace, in place of Elizabeth’s Chinese Hall. Borrowing from Palladio, Clérisseau, and Robert Adam, Cameron created a series of intimate, distinctive, and sophisticated spaces using a repertoire of classical forms and motifs. In addition to neoclassical elements like molded plaster reliefs, marble columns, and wall facings, he chose luxurious semiprecious stones for wall panels and molded glass for columns and ornaments. Cameron introduced a completely new palette, substituting bronze for gold, lavender for blue, olive and pistachio for bright green, and gray-blue for azure.
Like William Kent at Houghton Hall, Cameron designed the entire decorative scheme—from furniture and mantelpieces to the parquetry floors and ceiling paintings. Catherine had established Russia’s imperial bronze foundries in the last half of the 1760s, but their success between 1780 and 1800 was due to Charles Cameron. The factories began producing Cameron-designed fireplace furnishings, fire irons, and grates shaped like griffons and sphinxes, dragons and exotic birds. Cameron also used bronze for the capitals and bases of columns. Along with pottery and porcelain, the designer embellished the walls with bronze garlands and eagles after stuccoes in ancient Roman tombs. Large chandeliers, small lamps with bronze gilding, candlesticks with marble pedestals, and hundreds of cressets and candelabra illuminated the palace apartments.
Starting in the Fourth Apartment at the south end of the palace, Cameron razed two of Rastrelli’s baroque antechambers to the Great Hall to make room for the Arabesque Hall and Lyons Drawing Room. Russian historian S. N. Vilchkovski observed that the drawing room along with the neighboring Arabesque room “welcomed the whole life of the Court that had been led before in the Picture, the Amber and the Pillar rooms; only the Chinese Room separated the ‘Lyon Drawing-room’ from the personal rooms of the Empress. It was in the ‘Lyon Room’ that readers of reports waited to be called to the Study; it was there that the Empress used to play cards in the evening . . .”5
Catherine was thrilled with Cameron’s imaginative rooms. “I have an architect here named Kameron . . . the man has a fertile brain . . . and a great admiration for Clérisseau, so the latter’s drawings will help Kameron to decorate my new apartments here, and these apartments will be superlatively good,” she wrote Grimm in the summer of 1781. “So far only two rooms have been furnished, and people rush to see them because they have never before seen anything like them. I admit that I have not grown tired of looking at them for the last nine weeks; they are pleasing to the eye.”6
One of Catherine’s favorite spaces was the Lyons Drawing Room. Measuring 36 by 32 feet with a 28-foot-tall ceiling, the luxe room set the empress back some 40,000 pounds, not including the lapis lazuli from Lake Baikal that adorned the a pair of console tables, doors, and cornices. To create the intricately patterned parquet floor, Cameron used mother-of-pearl and fifty types of wood. The Italian Renaissance–style wall frieze featured garlanded cattle and sheep along with bronze bull heads. The sumptuous creamy yellow silk wall panels from Lyon, France, featured delicately embroidered peacocks, ducks, pheasants, and swans against a garden background with cartouches formed by garlands and vines. Framed in gilded carved wood, the 13-by-4-foot hangings were hung like paintings between a dozen mirrors.
The gorgeous panels came off the loom of Philippe de Lasalle, Lyon’s “Raphael of silk.” Lasalle studied with history painter Pierre Sarabat in Lyon and decorative painter François Boucher in Paris before partnering with Lyonese businessman Camille Pernon in 1760. Pernon sent his son Claude Camille Etienne to Russia to win commissions from Catherine. In 1773, the empress named the House of Pernon Furnisher by Appointment to the Russian Court and paid a large sum for hundreds of meters of Lasalle silk to decorate the walls and furniture of her palaces. Because her commissions represented a considerable share of Lasalle’s international business, many of his best works went to Russia.
Lasalle’s singular textiles combined innovative technique and decorative flair. To his signature flowers in garlands, bouquets, baskets, and vases, the designer often added vibrant birds and butterflies, along with temples and fountains, and shepherds and shepherdesses. By using different yarns, Lasalle created patterns through contrasts in the weave—like satin against taffeta or silk twill. When combined with lustrous silk, new silk chenille yarns added richness to the colors and a velveteen finish. Lasalle’s textiles graced the walls and furniture of the French and Spanish royal palaces, including Marie Antoinette’s bedroom at Fontainebleau.
For Catherine, Lasalle created tapestries and upholstery fabrics glorifying Russia’s military victories over the Turks. His Chesme silk brocade commemorating Russia’s naval victory featured the imperial eagle and orb alongside pink flowers and brilliant green foliage. Lasalle also wove several silk cameo-style portraits of Catherine, with Voltaire’s flattering verses embroidered below: “From the Nile to the Bosphorus The Ottoman trembles: Her people adore her. The world applauds.”7 Though Louis XVI ennobled Lasalle with the order of St. Michel and granted him an annual pension of 6,000 livres, the designer would only collect a fraction of this during the Revolution. In 1793, during the siege of Lyon, Lasalle’s celebrated looms were destroyed.
Cameron’s circular Rotunda led to either the Chinese Hall on the left or straight to the Fifth Apartment, a suite of the empress’s six private rooms. Catherine used the Silver Cabinet for private audiences and official correspondence. Catherine called the boudoir “La Tabatière” (the Snuffbox) after the enameled snuffboxes she liked to give as gifts. Cameron paneled the walls in sheets of white opaline and translucent blue glass. A glass table and two stools sported plates of milky white and blue transparent glass over crumpled silver foil. Slender columns of blue translucent glass flanked the doors, matching three pieces of lapis lazuli furniture. “One might be in a fairy tale!” exclaimed Ségur.8
While Cameron was designing the Fifth Apartment in 1783, Giacomo Quarenghi was beginning work on the Hermitage’s Raphael Loggia. Both the Silver Cabinet, lined with panels of precious metal, and the small Mirror Room next to Catherine’s bedroom were reminiscent of the Raphael Loggia, which Cameron may have known from either Clérisseau’s drawings or his visit to the Vatican. In 1781, Catherine wrote Grimm that her new private rooms were “more or less Raphaelesque.”
Cameron saved his most imaginative ideas for Catherine’s bedroom, paneled in milky white opaline glass. Separating the bed alcove from the main room were slender, ten-foot-tall colonnettes of amethyst-colored glass with chased gilt bronze capitals. Between the columns, Cameron added large mirrors to add space and depth. To recreate the look of Pompeiian panels, Cameron decorated the walls with some two dozen blue and white Wedgwood medallions and blue glass frames. Glass furniture included an exquisite small table with a white opaline top and gilt bronze molding, and blue glass legs and frieze.
When Paul and Maria Feodorovna departed for their European tour, Cameron began work in the opposite north end of the palace, replacing Rastrelli’s hanging garden with an eight-room ducal suite known as the First Apartment. Cameron complemented the patterned silk wall hangings in the large blue Drawing Room with candelabras and torchères of royal blue crystal and specially designed carved and gilded furniture. Below the geometric ceiling with its mythological scenes, Cameron installed a striking parquetry floor (the ceiling painting, destroyed by fire in 1820, was recreated in 1959 after Cameron’s drawing).
The Green Bedroom featured soft pistachio walls with white stucco decorations and fifty slender green and white porcelain columns. The grand duchess’s bedroom combined the intimacy of a private apartment with official stateroom luxury. Around a white silk canopy bed, Cameron formed an alcove with slender faience columns decorated with gold stripes and garlands of wildflowers. Cameron painted the series of doors with fantastic animals inset into circles, ovals, and rectangles. Framing the walls, Cameron added molded medallions with allegorical scenes of family love. A sleeping Venus and cupids adorned the fireplace.
Cameron drafted three sets of plans before getting the nod from Catherine on the Green Dining Room. Among the most Pompeian of the interiors, the pale green room featured doors painted with grotesques and molded white stucco decoration. Between figures of youths in antique garb and garlands of foliage and vases, Cameron added rectangular mythological reliefs and round medallions with playful cupids. A white marble fireplace featured a pair of carved lions and gilded bronze fire dogs. The grand duke and grand duchess dined seated on painted white chairs with green upholstery.
In 1782, Catherine asked Cameron to start work on her long awaited antique house, “a Graeco-Roman rhapsody in my Tsarskoye Selo garden.”9 In addition to a small army of Russians, Cameron recruited workmen and masons from Scotland to build the two-story structure. Above slabs of weathered Pudost travertine, the yellow upper floor featured classical decoration and a low Pantheon-like dome. French sculptor Lambert-Sigisbert Adam added depictions of the elements, Air, Water, Fire, and Earth to the façade. As always, Catherine played an active role in the design. “I have just settled down with Mr. Cameron,” she wrote. “. . . We’re sitting here designing a terrace with hanging gardens, with a bathing pool below and a gallery up above.”10
Baths had been a popular tradition in Russia for centuries. Though she was German, Catherine took to the Russian “banya” tradition, which involved long periods spent in a steam room. It was during her reign that the Russian word for bath, vanna, from the German wanne, entered into Russian vernacular. According to contemporaries, the empress preferred not to steam alone but with her favorites and loved to eat and drink in the bathhouse. In 1779, Ilya Neyelov created two stone baths on the banks of Tsarskoe Selo’s Mirror Pond. The lower bathhouse, inscribed “XVIII century court swimming,” was designed for Catherine; the upper bathhouse for family members.
Now, Charles Cameron produced something completely different on the pavilion ground floor—a luxurious spa inspired by the public baths, or thermae, of ancient Rome. Cameron based his design on Palladio’s measurements from the ruins of Rome’s Constantine Baths. The spa followed the ancient Roman tradition of gradually lowering the water temperature from room to room—from the steam bath to the large Bath Hall featuring a thirteen-cubic-foot circular tin swimming pool with a submerged bronze seat coated with polished gold. For one of the baths, Cameron copied a white marble Roman model, complete with a stone canopy supported by four columns and taps of gilded bronze.
Russian craftsmen had perfected a mosaic technique combing pieces of opaque colored glass (smalti) with various semiprecious stones. Cameron applied this mosaic work to various rooms of the Cold Bath. He fitted one pair of massive doors with mosaic panels in geometric patterns of red and green jasper. Apparently Cameron was more focused on the historical accuracy and luxe materials of the baths than creature comforts. Catherine complained to her secretary Alexander Khrapovitsky that it was impossible to actually bathe in them.
When Cameron asked Catherine if she’d like the stairs leading from the spa upstairs to the Agate Pavilion to be made of Russian marble or wild stone, she’d replied “from wild stone, but peaceful.” Following her wish, Cameron created a single winding flight of forty-one steps made of gray fine-grained granite. The ends of the steps (up to sixteen inches in length) were inserted into a special channel cut in the wall and wedged in with stone. The simple elegant balustrade featured vertical rods and smooth gilded rosettes with a polished handrail of Eastern Juniper; the stairwell floor was paved with white and gray marble.
Cameron lined the upstairs suite with stunning red jasper from the Urals. Because this material was known as jasper agate at the time, these rooms became known as the Agate Pavilion. Discovered in the 16th century, the hard, dense material did not lend itself easily to large projects. Cameron changed that, setting up a workshop at Tsarskoe Selo to cut the stone into panels for walls and strips for fireplaces and columns. For the striking Jasper Cabinet, Cameron contrasted deep red jasper with gray-green Kalkan jasper and red-and-green-striped Kushkuldin jasper.11 The neoclassical Vestibule, Great Hall, Oval Room, and Agate Rooms boasted more jaw-dropping varieties and colors—“blood” agate (maroon with white veins), malachite, agate, jasper, lapis lazuli, porphyry, alabaster, and colored marbles.
With her imperial palaces in mind, Catherine sponsored mining expeditions in the Urals and Altai mountains of central Asia. Adding to Peter the Great’s Imperial Lapidary Works at Peterhof, she helped establish lapidary workshops for polishing and grinding in Ekaterinburg in the Urals and Kolyvan in the Altai mountains. Popular varieties of colored stone included “Siberian” marble in gray with white veins (from the Urals), pink Tivda marble, red Shokshin quartzite (also known as red marble, similar to antique porphyry), black Urals marble, and pink-veined Karelian marble from Rusol.
Cameron’s Great Hall featured pale pink faux-marble walls and eight fluted columns in gray-pink Olonets marble from Karelia. The dramatic coffered ceiling was divided into an elaborate geometric design of panels with gilded gesso framing. Each panel was either painted or molded, mainly with dancing female figures. Much of the sculptural work was executed by Jacques Dominique Rachette, including candlesticks in the form of marble goddesses, large mythological wall medallions, and unique chimney pieces after Cameron’s designs. Cameron paneled the walls below the dado in heavily veined dark gray-green marble.
Flanking the Great Hall were the Agate Hall and Jasper Cabinet, both lavishly decorated with several types of polished jasper and other semiprecious stones. Cameron created the walls and columns with small pieces of red agate veined in white Jasper, known as meat agate; walls were lined with green jasper, with green jasper moldings, and red agate columns. The variety of colored stone, opulent paintings, ornate moldings, and gilded bronze produced a striking effect. Pompeian-style furniture on the handsome floor was inlaid with palissander (a rosewood) and palm wood. Excluding the jasper and agate from the Kolyvan mines, the bill for the Agate Pavilion exceeded 463,000 rubles. When touring her new pavilion in 1787, Catherine reportedly took Cameron by the arm, telling him: “It is indeed very handsome, but it is costing.”12
To connect the Agate Pavilion and Catherine’s private apartments, the Scot designed a ninety-yard long colonnade which became known as the Cameron Gallery. The addition of a door to Catherine’s Mirror Room allowed her to step out onto a terrace and stroll along the covered colonnade to the Pavilion. Cameron topped a massive rusticated ground floor of pudost stone with a delicate upper story colonnade of forty-four slender white columns, reminiscent of the Erechtheum, the beautiful Ionic temple at the Acropolis. Between the wide set white columns he placed some fifty busts of Catherine’s favorite philosophers and statesmen, cast in bronze from Italian copies of antique marble sculptures. The only contemporary figures were Russian scholar Mikhail Lomonosov, Austria’s Joseph II, and British politician Charles James Fox, who helped avert war with Russia. In the winter, the busts were taken in to protect them from the cold.
The Cameron Gallery became Catherine’s favorite promenade. In rainy weather, the empress strolled through the central section, enjoying views of her formal flower gardens on one side and an English park and Great Pond on the other. Cameron designed special furniture for the gallery, including large carved wood candelabra and folding armchairs in wrought iron inspired by ancient Greece. “I am presently quite infatuated with Master Cameron . . . who is inspired by his study of the Ancients,” Catherine wrote Voltaire. “With him we are making at Tsarskoe Selo a terraced garden, with baths below and a gallery above.” Catherine also wrote Melchior Grimm, describing the gallery’s sculpture as “the most beautiful ancient and modern statues in existence.”13
At the gallery’s east end, Cameron built an impressive entrance by merging two graceful rounded staircases into one. He topped the pylons with Fiodor Gordeyev’s enormous bronze statues of Hercules and Flora, modeled after ancient originals. Catherine bragged to Grimm about Cameron’s elegant neoclassical complex: “To drive you wild, monsieur le chevalier, I have to tell you that you will no longer be able to find me here after dinner, because apart from seven rooms garnished in jasper, agate, and real and artificial marble, and a garden right at the door of my apartments, I have an immense colonnade which also leads to this garden and which ends in a flight of stairs leading straight to the lake. So, search for me after that, if you can!”14
The Cameron Gallery and Agate Pavilion had a powerful effect on visitors. Gavriil Derzhavin described the colonnade as “a temple where the graces dance to the sound of the harp” and Ippolit Bogdanovich proclaimed “it is only possible for the Gods to have created” such a space. Alexander Pushkin called the Cameron Gallery “the temple of the Minerva of Rus” and “a mansion rushing to the clouds.”15 (Pushkin studied at the nearby Lyceum, built by Catherine for her grandchildren.)
“The most interesting park in the world” is how Ligne described Catherine’s ensemble in 1781. “. . . Tsarskoe Selo which contains what the Empress calls her fantasies presents on all sides the most charming of pictures. These fantasies, so called, are water and optical effects, well imagined and varied, such as a bridge of Siberian marble in an architecture styled by Palladio, baths, a Turkish pavilion, the Admiralty—a sort of town that has been set up—iron gates, a ruin, monuments to the victories of Romianzov and Orlov, a superb rostral column in the middle of the lake to commemorate Chesme . . . Chinese bridges and kiosks, a temple with thirty-two marble columns, a colonnade and above all the grand staircase of Hercules on the garden side. . . . It is here that the great princess, the honour of her sex, dropping for a moment the reins of government, takes up a pencil, a rake, a pruning hook . . .”16
Along with the ideals of Greek and Roman antiquity, Catherine used her summer compound to express her ambitious political aspirations and military successes. In the fall of 1780, Catherine dismissed Nikita Panin, her long-serving pro-Prussian foreign minister. Succeeding Panin as foreign affairs adviser, Alexander Bezborodko drafted a plan in which Russia would gain a large swath of land around the Black Sea and Austria would take Belgrade and Bosnia. The following spring, after months of negotiations and the death of Joseph’s mother and co-ruler Maria Theresa, Russia and Austria became allies. Catherine soon wrote to Austrian Emperor Joseph II detailing the “Greek Project.”
Still angry over the loss of Silesia to Prussia’s Frederick the Great during his mother’s reign, Joseph II was now looking to expand the Habsburg Empire. Among his ambitions was trading the Austrian Netherlands (today’s Belgium) for Bavaria, a plan thwarted by Frederick. Joseph saw an alliance with Russia as protection against Prussia, which he feared, along with a means to gain Turkish territory in the Balkans and eastern Mediterranean. He also had his eye on the Republic of Venice. Catherine’s ultimate goal, meanwhile, was to restore the Greek Orthodox Empire—the eastern half of the former Roman Empire that would be ruled from Byzantium, or Constantinople, by her grandson. Born in April 1779, christened Konstantin Pavlovich after Constantine the Great, the baby was groomed for the job from the start. Catherine imported a Greek wet nurse named Helena and relocated several Greek families to Tsarskoe Selo so the youngster could learn Greek before Russian.
For over a millennium, Greece had been part of the Byzantine Empire, established in 330 A.D. by Constantine the Great. He’d moved the capital of the Roman Empire east to the small town of Byzantium (today’s Istanbul) and converted to Christianity. Renamed for him, Constantinople came to represent splendor and power. Greek replaced Latin as the official language; theology, scholarship, and artistic production flourished. According to medieval Russian documents, Prince Vladimir had founded the Russian Orthodox Church in Crimea. In 988, after seizing Chersonesos, he negotiated for the hand of Emperor Basil II’s sister, Anna. Baptized at Chersonesos, Vladimir took the Christian name Basil after his future imperial brother-in-law and wed Anna.
In 1453, the Turks vanquished the Byzantine Empire and seized Constantinople. Because the daughter of the Empire’s last ruler, Constantine XI Paleologus, married a Russian tsar, Byzantium was regarded as Russia’s historical and cultural birthplace. Peter the Great added “King of Greece” to his titles. Reportedly, Peter’s dying wish was “to conquer Constantinople, to chase the infidel Turks and Tatars out of Europe, and thus to reestablish the Greek monarchy.”17 With the same crusade-like fervor, Catherine took up Peter’s quest. Thanks to Russia’s gains from the war against Turkey, Constantinople was tantalizingly close—just across the sea from Crimea.
As Dmitry Shvidkovsky describes, Catherine’s guests at Tsarskoe Selo were transported to Constantinople architecturally starting at the Orlov Gate, where a banner proclaimed: “Through the waves you will enter the shrine of Sophia.”18 Catherine’s complex ideologies were expressed in a tower ruin by Velten that combined a large antique column, small Turkish pavilion, and wall fragment from the Kremlin—a symbol of Russian history. On Catherine’s order, Cameron designed a church inspired by the architecture of the Hagia Sophia, Constantinople’s iconic Byzantine basilica. Ivan Starov would supervise the construction of the church—classical on the outside, with an interior dome, large open space, and red granite colonnade.
Cameron’s church stood in a wide square, the epicenter of Sophia, a miniature ideal city Catherine ordered from him in 1780 to offer her guests a picturesque view. The fan-shaped town became home to merchants, workmen, and a colony of British craftsmen recruited to help Cameron execute his projects. The part of the town facing Catherine Palace was especially elegant, with houses sporting three-story façades. In addition to a huge post office complex with stables and accommodations, Cameron built a spinning mill, linen and silk factories, office buildings, and an arcade. Cameron’s streetlights were only lit when Catherine was in residence.
Catherine’s carefully choreographed visual allegory centered on a man-made lake called the Great Pond, representing the Black Sea. Around this, Catherine’s architects designed numerous classical-style monuments with clear symbolic messages. “When this war is over,” wrote Catherine, “my gardens at Tsarskoe Selo will look like a children’s playground, after each successful military action we put of a fitting monument there. The Battle of Kagul . . . resulted in an obelisk with an inscription . . . the Sea Battle of Chesma produced a Rostral Column in the middle of the Great Pond. The taking of the Crimea . . . is commemorated in different ways in different places.”19
With her embrace of neoclassical architecture, Catherine vividly connected Russia’s capital with the Rome of antiquity. Poets likened St. Petersburg to ancient Rome and Catherine to Minerva, while she compared herself to Augustus. “August said that he found Rome built of brick and would leave it built of marble; I say that I found Petersburg virtually wooden and will leave its buildings dressed in marble,” she wrote Frau Bielcke.20 More than any of her fellow rulers, writes Dmitry Shvidkovsky, Catherine used architecture and garden design to embody her aspirations. This was especially true of her overarching ambition, the Greek Project—retaking Istanbul from the Turks and creating a new Christian Byzantium.
Though Catherine, like Peter the Great, curtailed the Church’s power in order to strengthen her own rule, there was something deeply rooted in Russian culture about the Church and Orthodoxy that the German-born empress needed to play up politically. Since converting to Orthodoxy as a teenage bride, Catherine had made it a point to make pilgrimages, observe church festivals, and regularly attend services. Her very public displays of devotion included stops at the church of the Kazan Bogoroditsa whenever she left and returned to St. Petersburg. This focus on Orthodoxy likely played a part and perhaps fed into this desire to remodel St. Petersburg on Rome, Christendom’s flagship city.