On the day of her coup, while Catherine was addressing cheering regiments in St. Petersburg, her husband, Tsar Peter III, was nursing a bad hangover at his new summer palace at Oranienbaum. He wouldn’t get to enjoy it much—or celebrate his name day at a gala at nearby Peterhof. Dressed in a borrowed green Guards uniform, her hair perfectly coiffed, Catherine mounted a white stallion and led 14,000 men out of St. Petersburg south to Oranienbaum. There, a handful of Guards officers, headed by her lover’s ruthless brother Alexei Orlov, aka “Scarface,” arrested Peter III. A week later, after a midday meal at nearby Ropsha, Peter’s captors tried to suffocate him with a mattress. When the tsar escaped, they strangled him with a scarf. Catherine’s takeover was complete—and unexpectedly easy. In the biting words of Peter III’s idol Frederick the Great, “He allowed himself to be dethroned like a child sent off to bed.”1
Catherine’s loveless marriage was a disaster from the start. Though Peter was a year older than Catherine, his behavior was immature and childlike. “. . . There is nothing worse than having a child-husband,” she wrote her mother’s friend in Hamburg, Madame Bielke. “I know it by experience, and I am one of those women who believe that it is always the fault of the husband if he is not loved, for in truth I would have loved mine very much, if it had been possible to do so, and if he had had the kindness to want it.”2 With the childless Empress Elizabeth growing anxious for a Romanov heir, she encouraged 25-year-old Catherine to have an affair with “handsome as the dawn” Count Sergey Saltykov. Many historians believe Saltykov may have fathered her son, the future Paul I.
In contrast to Catherine, her German-born husband disliked everything about Russia, including its religion. Just as Russia was enjoying an advantage in the hard fought Seven Years’ War, the newly crowned Peter III made peace with Frederick the Great. Peter’s pro-Prussian policies and inappropriate conduct, on top of overly extravagant spending even by Russian imperial standards, alienated important constituencies, including the army, the Church, and the courtiers. Enmity between the imperial couple was also reaching a boiling point, with a drunk Peter at one point threatening to have Catherine arrested. Though Peter backed off, writes Robert Massie, Catherine understood that he wanted to end their marriage. “Things took such a turn that it was necessary to perish with him, by him, or else to try to save oneself from the wreckage and to save my children, and the state,” she would later write in her memoir.3 Plotting alongside Catherine was her lover Gregory Orlov and his four brothers, who mustered support of Russia’s powerful Guards regiments. When Catherine proclaimed herself empress, most Russians breathed a sigh of relief.
Given Peter’s bloody, ignoble end, it’s surprising that Catherine did not stay clear of Oranienbaum, the Romanov’s summer compound on the Gulf of Finland, once the coup was complete. In fact, in her first commission as tsarina, Catherine hired Peter’s court architect, Antonio Rinaldi, to build her private dacha on the estate. Oranienbaum’s original resident, Peter the Great’s powerful associate and Field Marshal Alexander Menshikov, built a lavish main palace around the same time his mentor was constructing Peterhof, five miles to the west. As a symbol of its luxury and status, Menshikov named the property Oranienbaum, German for “wild orange tree,” after the citrus trees that grew in the conservatory. Menshikov ran the Empire during the reign of Peter’s widow, Catherine I. After her death, Menshikov was exiled to Siberia by the aristocracy. A decade later, Peter’s heirs confiscated Oranienbaum; in 1743, Empress Elizabeth gave the property to her nephew Peter.
As Grand Duchess, Catherine gardened at Oranienbaum and bought land adjoining the estate, dreaming of her own dacha. At age twenty, she was already showing signs of her theatrical interests. “For this I ordered the Italian architect Antonio Rinaldi to build in an isolated part of the woods a large platform for an orchestra of 60 musicians and singers,” Catherine recalled in her memoirs. “I also ordered the Italian court poet to write some verses and the chapel master Araja to compose the music. On the garden’s main passage, an illuminated stage and curtain were put up, and in front of them a table was set for dinner . . . After the first course, the curtain, which was hiding the main passage, rose, and the spectators saw approaching from afar about twenty bulls transporting the moving orchestra, which was adorned with garlands, and they were surrounded by as many dancers as I could find. Everybody jumped up from their table to get a better view of the beauty of the symphony and the spectacle.”4
Antonio Rinaldi had been recruited to work in Kiev and Baturin by Cyril Razumovsky, hetman of the Ukraine and younger brother of Elizabeth’s favorite, Alexei Razumovsky. From there, Rinaldi moved on to Oranienbaum, where he designed a miniature rococo-style palace with fortifications to please the military-obsessed Peter III. For her own retreat, Catherine chose a charming wooded area on the upper park behind Menshikov’s palace. Catherine and Gregory Orlov had been lovers for just over a year, and she had borne his son, Alexei, in secrecy two months before her coup. “Nature was unusually generous when it came to his physique, intellect, heart and soul,” she wrote about the handsome war hero.5 She wanted a place that was “hers and hers alone”—a secluded setting for trysts with her lover during the long White Nights of summer.
In July 1768, Catherine invited forty guests to a luncheon and garden tour of her new palace. Their first glimpse of the ochre and yellow dacha was its reflection in an ornamental lake. With twenty-eight ground floor rooms and nine reception rooms, the long one-story palace was modest in size for a royal residence. But there was nothing modest about the interiors, some of century’s most lavish and elegant. Critic Alexander Benois called the palace “one of the foremost places in the history of eighteenth century art . . . a work of art with such integrity, such harmony, such superb execution—such a grand, exquisite knick-knack that, looking at it, one simply has to fall in love. The painted patterns, the stucco ornament, the paintings, the architectural details—all of these are linked in a single inseparable whole that has in its purely musical effect something in common with the sonatas of Haydn and Mozart.”6
To help create these harmonious interiors, Rinaldi recruited a team of compatriots that included Venetian fresco virtuoso Giambattista Tiepolo, Bolognese brothers Giuseppe and Serafino Barozzi, and Stefano Torelli. In addition to the graceful mythological ceiling paintings created on site by Torelli and Barozzi, over a dozen large canvases arrived from the Venetian Academy of Arts to adorn the remaining ceilings. Scagliola (artificial marble) and delicately modeled stucco work also adorned walls and ceilings. Using local and foreign varieties of wood, Russian craftsmen executed Rinaldi’s intricately patterned parquet floors.
Rinaldi was a master of rococo. Derived from rocaille, French for “shell,” the decorative style had swept through Europe and Russia after its start in Louis XV’s France. In choosing chinoiserie, an ornamental offshoot of rococo, Catherine and Rinaldi were right on trend. Since the earliest contacts with China in the 16th century, Europeans had been smitten with the East. Peter the Great’s envoys to China brought back caravans of luxurious silk, porcelain, silver, and tea. By Catherine’s day, this infatuation had spread to architecture, garden pavilions, and interior décor.
As work began on Catherine’s Chinese Palace, Frederick the Great was completing a Chinese Teahouse at Sanssouci, his summer palace in Potsdam. George III’s architect William Chambers had just built Europe’s most ambitious chinoiserie garden structure at London’s Kew Gardens—a brightly colored, towering pagoda with bell-carrying golden dragons. Chambers was one of the few European architects who actually visited China; most had no firsthand knowledge of Asia. The popular teahouses and pagodas, tapestries, furniture, and porcelain they produced had little basis in reality, representing what David Porter calls “a fairy-tale fascination with distant images of unimaginable grandeur, wealth, and strangeness . . .”7
But to Catherine, ardent disciple of the Enlightenment, chinoiserie represented more than a whimsical twist on rococo. Central to Enlightenment thought was the concept of a shared humanity across cultures. Voltaire had praised the Celestial Kingdom, where life, honor, and property were protected by law—the kind of enlightened rule Catherine aspired to in Russia. Catherine intended for her guests to experience a completely new environment as they entered her dacha—a kind of virtual tour of exotic lands and cultures. She recreated a similar experience with eastern “exotica” at the Winter Palace, about which she wrote Melchior Grimm: “This museum forms a corner, which you enter through China, to get to China you go through Turkey, which in turn is entered via Persia. . . . here everything is imbued with the ambrosia of Asia.”8
At the east end of the dacha, sunlight streamed through the French windows along both sides of the exquisite pink and blue Hall of Muses. Guests found themselves surrounded by pastel murals of the Nine Muses by Stefano Torelli. These include Urania, muse of astrology; Thalia, muse of comedy; and Terpsichore, muse of dancing and singing. Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, holds the Odyssey, the Iliad, and the Aeneid. Floral and musical motifs in the ceiling and walls are echoed in the patterns of the parquet floor.
In the breathtaking Bugle Bead Cabinet, a dozen silk embroidered panels of colorful birds, bouquets, and plants covered the walls. Adding a dreamy effect were some two million milky glass bugle beads—sewn horizontally onto the panels by nine Russian needlewomen. The eighteen-month-long project was supervised by Marie de Chele, a former actress with a French theatrical troupe in St. Petersburg. Each hanging was fixed to the wall in a gilded frame carved in the shape of a palm tree and topped by a small dragon. The supplier of the beads, Mikhail Lomonosov, had revived the lost art of glass mosaic. Lomonosov designed two inlaid glass mosaic tables for the cabinet, using some ninety different colors (one with a trompe l’oeil game of cards), and a spectacular matching mosaic floor (replaced in the 19th century by a wood floor after the glass design).
From the Bugle Bead Cabinet, guests entered the palace’s largest room, the oval-shaped Great Hall. Facing each over the main doors are profile bas-reliefs of Peter the Great and Empress Elizabeth by French sculptress Marie-Anne Collot, set in blue and red smalt glass and decorated with gilded copper and enamel. Bright blue and pink scagliola covered the walls along with The Abduction of Ganymede and Juno and a Genius by Torelli. The highlight of the magnificent reception room was Giambattista Tiepolo’s ceiling painting Mars Resting surrounded by delicate plasterwork in pink, gray, white, and gilt. Tiepolo executed the mythological scene just before leaving Venice for Madrid in the spring of 1762 to work for Spain’s Charles III.
More opulence awaited in the west wing with a trio of chinoiserie state rooms. The Small Chinese Cabinet featured elegant painted Chinese silk wall coverings in reds, green, dark blue, and gold, along with a geometric patterned parquet floor with latticework and bowls of flowers. A chinoiserie mantel with a geometric design topped the rococo fire screen. Chinese dragons spread their wings in the corners of the geometrically patterned ceiling. For the Large Chinese Room, the Barozzi brothers combined walrus ivory with twenty types of wood to create intricate wall panels featuring landscapes, figures, and exotic birds. Atop the marquetry floor were pieces of Chinese furniture and cabinets and a fireplace adorned with Chinese and Japanese porcelain. Overhead, surrounded by dragons and palm fronds, was The Marriage of Europe and Asia symbolizing Russia’s growing empire. Large mirrors covered the walls and ceiling of Catherine’s glittering gold and white Chinese Bedroom. A French writing desk and cabinet adorned the Golden Study, the empress’s small private library.
At Catherine’s request, Rinaldi also designed the three-story blue and white Sliding Hill Pavilion to the northwest of the Chinese Palace, used for the popular sport known as montagne russe. Capped with a dome resembling a bell or Chinese hat, the Pavilion was lavishly ornamented with columns, pilasters, and decorative vases, along with balustrades along the perimeters of the ground floor and two main stories. A large spiral staircase led to the third story “starting platform.” From a covered colonnaded gallery, Catherine and her guests watched courtiers careen down the third of a mile long wooden slope in four-wheeled gilded carts decorated in the shape of ancient chariots, gondolas, and saddled lions and bears.
Catherine entertained guests in the airy, sunlit Round Hall, whose windows looked out on the sea and park. Using a pale palette of green, pink, yellow, and blue, the Barozzi brothers created exquisite wall and door decorations, including deer leaping in a circle around a low, trellis patterned dome. Rinaldi designed the beautiful pink, blue, and green artificial marble floor with arabesque motifs. Also on the ground floor, Serafino Barozzi created the Porcelain Room, where gilded monkey-shaped brackets supported shelves of Meissen porcelain. Like those of the Chinese Palace, Rinaldi’s parquet floors were a tour de force of design. Oak, maple, birch, rosewood, box, mahogany, ebony, Persian walnut, and amaranth were used to create sophisticated motifs of plants, flowers, branches, wreaths, and leaves. The rich woodcarving continued throughout the pavilion, along with painted ceilings and murals.
With its rococo images of muses, art, and love, the whimsical Chinese Palace embodied Catherine II’s personality and youthful taste. It also marked the start of what would become an extraordinary three-decade building spree. But for Catherine, the intimate, secluded retreat also had deep romantic associations with Gregory Orlov, whom she described as “A hero . . . like the Ancient romans . . . and is of just such bravery and magnanimity.”9 When their relationship ended, so did Catherine’s interest in Oranienbaum. In thirty years, she visited less than fifty times. Though Catherine’s interest in rococo was brief, she remained a fan of chinoiserie, creating an entire Chinese Village at Tsarskoe Selo.