Catherine installed Michelangelo’s Crouching Boy alongside Houdon’s Seated Voltaire in the lakeside grotto at Tsarskoe Selo, where she enjoyed having her early morning coffee. “The statue of Voltaire sculpted by Houdon has been unpacked and placed in the Morning Salon,” she wrote Melchior Grimm, “. . . To enter this salon is literally to have one’s breath taken away, and—marvelous to report!—Houdon’s statue of Voltaire is in no way diminished by all that surrounds it. . . . He gazes upon everything that is most beautiful in statues both antique and modern.”1
The year Seated Voltaire arrived, Catherine also bought Houdon’s Diana the Huntress. Carved in 1780, the masterpiece had a tumultuous history. The marble was initially commissioned by another client of Melchior Grimm—Duke Ernest II of Saxe-Gotha. According to H. H. Arnason, when the duke rejected Houdon’s designs for his mother’s tomb in 1775, Grimm suggested he compensate the sculptor for several years of work by ordering a statue for his English garden at Schloss Friedenstein in Gotha. Grimm suggested Diana—a subject Houdon had been experimenting with for several years.2 After accepting the proposal, the duke received Houdon’s large plaster model in 1776.
Diana, goddess of the moon and the hunt, had long been a popular figure in sculpture and painting. Since antiquity and the Renaissance, she’d either been depicted bathing (from the story of Diana and Actaeon in Ovid’s Metamorphoses), or clothed for the hunt, usually wearing a belted tunic and sandals. Breaking with tradition, Houdon depicted Diana entirely nude, a crescent moon in her hair, holding an arrow in her right hand and a bow diagonally in her left hand. To support the heavy marble figure, Houdon set the athletic goddess against a bush of reeds, to which she is attached at points of the left leg and thigh (similar to the technique used by the Greeks and Romans, and Renaissance and Baroque sculptors). To support the left arm, Houdon placed a quiver slung behind her suspended by the shoulder strap.3
Houdon intended to display Diana at the 1777 Paris Salon, but a watchdog commission rejected it along with Frileuse. With its nudity and explicit modeling of the vulva, Diana was deemed obscene and prurient. Grimm staunchly defended the work, arguing that nudity of gods and goddesses conformed to norms of modesty. Grimm’s praise did not convince the Duke of Saxe-Gotha, who no longer wanted the statue. In early 1783, Catherine agreed to purchase the marble for 20,000 livres.
The controversy surrounding the sculpture may have added to its popularity. Diana (today at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, Portugal) is now considered one of Houdon’s masterpieces, a work of great beauty, originality, and technical sophistication. “Its nudity and impassiveness of the face call to mind the Venuses of classical antiquity: the elongation of the female proportions, the inner torsion of the figure, the multiplicity of viewpoints it prompts, the tip of the foot as sole support all recall the art of the 16th century,” writes Guilhem Scherf, chief sculpture conservator at the Louvre. “. . . All the features compose a harmonious, timeless ideal of womanhood.”4
After Alexander Lanskoy’s death, Catherine waited nearly a year before taking a new lover. Around Easter 1785, Potemkin introduced her to another one of his aides—31-year-old Alexander Yermolov. After passing muster with Anna Protasova, the Semyonovsky Life Guards warrant officer moved into Lanskoy’s former Winter Palace apartment. “. . . [E]xtremely capable and worthy of his position” is how Catherine described her tall, blond favorite with almond shaped eyes and a flat nose. “. . . [H]e’s a good boy,” Count Cobenzl reported, “but quite limited.”5
After a long period of sadness, Catherine wrote Potemkin that her “inner self has regained its calm and serenity.”6 With Catherine happy, Potemkin was free to run the southern provinces. But the aging empress’s continued selection of younger men was increasingly becoming a source of derision. A French diplomat wrote: “It would be better if she had only these loves for the physicality, but it’s a rare thing among older people and when their imagination is not dead, they make a hundred times more a fool of themselves than a young man.”7
On her birthday, April 21, Catherine enacted the Charter to the Nobility and the Charter to the Towns. A month later, Catherine and Yermolov left Tsarskoe Selo on an inspection trip of a major canal project (part of today’s Volga-Baltic Waterway). Catherine had replaced the wood of Peter the Great’s locks with stone, and directed new water sources into the canals. New canals were under construction—one to join the Caspian and Black seas and a second to connect the Black Sea to the Baltic via the Dneiper River. In addition to Yermolov, Catherine’s sixteen-person entourage included Gregory Potemkin, Countesses Protasova and Rostopchin, Count Ivan Chernyshev, Grand Chamberlain Ivan Shuvalov, and Master of the Horse Lev Naryshkin.
Also in Catherine’s twenty-carriage convoy were her “pocket ministers”—Austria’s Cobenzl, France’s Count de Ségur, and England’s Alleyne Fitzherbert. Catherine’s tacit arrangement with the trio was that in exchange for her hospitality, they’d sing her praises back home. Ségur noted the empress’s appearance at this time: “In order to disguise the corpulence of advancing years, which efface all the graces, she wore a full gown with wide sleeves, very like the ancient Muscovite dress. The whiteness and brilliance of her complexion were the attractions she kept the longest.”8
Catherine extended the excursion south to Moscow where she stopped to visit her collection of imperial palaces. In June, she arrived to inspect her nearly complete new imperial estate, Tsaritsyno Palace, southeast of Moscow. After ten years of construction, the walls for both Catherine’s and Paul’s palaces along with a third building for Paul’s children were finished and work had begun on a vast two-story kitchen and service wing connected to the main palace compound by a colonnade and gate. In what William Brumfield calls one of the most bizarre forms in Russian architecture, Bazhenov designed a semicircular brick arch with limestone “teeth” flanked by intertwined coronets.9
In a letter to Paul and Maria Feodorovna, Catherine expressed frustration with Tsaritsyno which “. . . needs to be changed inside, or else it will be uninhabitable . . . The city of Moscow is improving, much is being built there and very well; the aqueduct is a great work in progress.”10 In fact, Catherine was furious with Bazhenov. After the inspection, “she returned to her carriages in a rage, and commanded . . . that [the new complex] should be razed to the ground.”11 By the following February, Catherine signed a formal decree to demolish Bazhenov’s imperial palaces. The main issue may have been Bazhenov’s identical mother and son palaces. By 1785, Catherine’s relationship with Paul had deteriorated even more. She felt threatened by her son and his support among Moscow’s grandees. After the elegance of Charles Cameron’s additions at Tsarskoe Selo, Bazhenov’s heavy style and elaborate façades may have also seemed oppressive, and provided the perfect fodder on which she could lash out.12
Catherine may have taken exception to the addition of cryptic symbols of Freemasonry, a secret male society she deeply suspected and to which Bazhenov belonged. In 1786, with Bazhenov’s work demolished, she authorized new plans by his assistant Matvey Kazakov. The new plan featured a palace for Catherine only with Paul’s palace eliminated altogether. On-again, off-again, the ill-fated project was canceled after Catherine’s death, leaving grand ruins for over two centuries. In 2007, the property was finally turned into a convention center.
In July 1785, Catherine took another short trip to inspect her new palace at Pella, returning by boat along the Neva. Again, she invited her pocket ministers along with Yermolov and Potemkin’s niece Countess Alexandra Branicka. “Monsieur Kelchen assured us on the way that is was impossible to die from laughing; this must be true, as no one is dead, even though we laughed fit to burst from morning to night,” she wrote about the excursion.13
The mid 1780s marked the height of splendor at Catherine’s court. Each Sunday, the empress hosted large diplomatic fêtes at the Hermitage. To hide her increasing weight, Catherine wore Russian gowns with long sleeves, allowing her to go corset- and panier-free. One guest described her “dressed in a purple tissue petticoat and long white tissue sleeves down the wrist and the body open . . . of a very elegant dress.” Often the sleeves, skirt, and body of the empress’s dress were different colors. Princess Dashkova and Countess Branicka followed Catherine’s lead, but other women continued to wear French fashions.14
Like Catherine, Potemkin entertained lavishly at his residences in St. Petersburg and Tsarskoe Selo. In the capital, Ivan Starov added a third story to Anichkov Palace and embellished the façade with Doric columns. After Potemkin traded the huge palace to repay a large debt, Catherine reacquired it for him (a gesture she’d repeat with Tauride Palace). Smitten by Horace Walpole’s neo-Gothic Strawberry Hill outside London, Potemkin had Starov remodel Ozerki and Ostrovsky Palaces with towers and spires. In a wooded forest adjoining Tsarskoe Selo, architect Ilya Neyelov designed Bablovo, complete with a central medieval tower and Gothic arches.15
Enjoying unprecedented power, Potemkin set up his own virtual court in the south, with Vasily Popov as chancellor. As Catherine developed health problems associated with obesity, Potemkin managed to ruin his health by working obsessively; supervising the building of cities, naval ports, and ships; recruiting foreign settlers; and developing industry. As Simon Sebag Montefiore describes, Potemkin was effectively co-ruler with Catherine, running an “empire within an empire.”16 Mutually dependent on one another, Catherine assumed the role of wife and mother during Potemkin’s long absences, nagging him to take his medicines and mending his jackets. As Catherine aged, Potemkin’s procurement of young favorites drew increasing ridicule.