Alexander Mamonov was among those who caught Catherine’s “gem disease.” Around 1780, with the galleries of the Hermitage brimming with Old Master paintings, Catherine redirected her attention to building another world-class collection. It became a self-described affliction, a “species of gluttony that spreads like scabies.”
The objects of Catherine’s obsession were tiny gemstones, exquisitely engraved or carved with mythological and historical motifs. Known as glyptics from the classical Greek word “to cut,” these gems fit neatly in the palm of Catherine’s hand. “God knows the pleasure to be had from handling all these stones every day, and the endless knowledge to be gleaned from it,” the empress confessed to Grimm.1
As a lover of glyptics, Catherine was following a long tradition. One of the oldest art forms in history, carved gems had been status symbols for discerning collectors since antiquity. First-century Roman poet and astrologer Manilius expressed their magical power: “Gems! In pursuit of these stones, men will risk their all, Cross the width of the world, challenge the might of the sea.”2
Intaglios—gems with incised or hollowed out designs—go back to the 4th and 3rd millennia B.C. in Mesopotamia and the Aegean. During Alexander the Great’s reign, artisans also began producing a raised relief image, known as a cameo, by carving the background of the gem. Greek and Roman artists perfected intaglio engraving and cameo carving. The Hellenistic period (late 4th to 1st centuries B.C.) brought the discovery of new precious and semiprecious materials like aquamarine, garnet, and hyacinth. Polychromatic hardstone cameos were the most coveted. By working contrasting bands of color into intricate compositions, the best carvers evoked painting and sculpture.
During the Middle Ages, glyptics adorned jewelry and religious objects like shrines, reliquaries, and book covers. By the 15th century, antique cameos, carnelians, sardonyx, and other hardstone intaglios were unearthed from the ruins of ancient Rome and the eastern Mediterranean, becoming prized additions to antiquarian collections. After Pope Paul II’s death in 1471, the Medici family bought his prestigious gem collection. When Lorenzo the Magnificent died in 1492, his finest cameos were valued several times more than his Botticelli paintings.
Like Lorenzo de’ Medici, Catherine pursued the world’s most coveted gems. She began her collection the year after her accession, buying a small cache of forty carved stones from the estate of court engraver and medalist Lorenz Natter. As she did with paintings, Catherine began acquiring entire glyptic collections, known as cabinets. In 1782, with the help of her diplomats and art agents, she bought important cabinets in Rome, Paris, and London. “My little collection of carved stones is such that yesterday four men had difficulty in carrying two baskets of jewel cases which contained barely half of the collection,” Catherine boasted to Grimm. “To avoid misunderstanding I should point out that these were the same baskets we use to carry logs in winter.”3
In 1785, Catherine talked Princess Dashkova, president of the Academy of Sciences, into exchanging a large part of the institution’s carved gems for a mineralogical cabinet. The main prize was a spectacular cameo-encrusted gold cup—a diplomatic gift from the Queen of Denmark to Peter’s wife Catherine during their visit to Copenhagen in 1716. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century engraved gems covered the three-footed cup from lid to base.
“As to the vase and its antiques,” Catherine wrote Dashkova, “I will receive them only from your hands, and in exchange for the cases of natural history. . . .” Catherine ordered the cameos removed and placed in her gem cabinet, and the gold cup melted down.4 From a detailed drawing from the 1730s, art historians have identified a number of the gems, including the Renaissance pieces Nymph and Faun in agatonyx, Judgment of Paris and Phaeton in the Chariot of the Sun in chalcedony and gold, and Adam and Eve in green sardonyx and gold.
Dashkova, who called herself “Catherine the Small,” shared Catherine’s passion for stones. Among her gifts were a 17th-century intaglio of Oliver Cromwell dressed as a Roman general and a sardonyx intaglio thought to be a 16th-century original. Catherine advised her differently. “I have just received your report and with it a magnificent gem, for which many heartfelt thanks,” she wrote. “I accept it with the greatest pleasure . . . though with one reservation, my dear Princess—it is not really Michelangelo’s famous antique gem, which, according to Montfaucon, belongs to the French royal cabinet. I think your information from Italy is not worth translating; I am not sure where the truth lies, but I for my part believe in my expert.”5
In 1787, Catherine took her collection to a new level by acquiring the Orléans cabinet in Paris. Faced with gambling debts, Louis Philippe Joseph Duke d’Orléans (Philippe Égalité) published his family’s illustrious gem collection in a sumptuous engraved volume dedicated to his cousin, Louis XVI. Writing Grimm that the dispersal would cause Philippe II to turn in his grave, Catherine begged her agent to stall the auction and negotiate for the 1,500-piece trove.
With the Orléans acquisition, Catherine became the proud owner of some of the world’s most famous gems. The prestigious gemmae had been amassed by several generations, starting in the 16th century with Count Palatine Otto-Heinrich. In 1685, the count’s granddaughter Elisabeth-Charlotte, Princess Palatine, inherited the collection and passed it on to the Dukes of Orléans with her arranged marriage to Philippe I, Duke d’Orléans, Louis XIV’s younger brother (the Sun King invaded the Palatinate that year, destroying the castle where the cabinet was originally housed). First cousin of England’s George I, Elisabeth-Charlotte added another six hundred stones—ancient glyptics by master engravers along with Renaissance pieces.
In 1741, Elisabeth-Charlotte’s grandson, Louis III, Duke d’Orléans, added further luster to the family cabinet by acquiring Pierre Crozat’s 1,400 beloved gems. Three had belonged to Lorenzo de’ Medici, including The Head of a Greek Woman in cornelian. Among Crozat’s ancient masterpieces was the stunning 1st century cameo Venus and Eagle from the workshop of Alexandria carver Sostratus. Against a blue-black night sky, Sostratus carved Zeus as an eagle from a pale blue-gray layer. Venus, carved in white and pink layers, is shown embracing the eagle.
With the arrival of the Orléans cabinet, Catherine transferred her growing gemmae collection from the North Pavilion of the Small Hermitage to the Large Hermitage. To house the treasures, Catherine ordered five large identical oak and mahogany cabinets from cabinetmaker David Roentgen. Behind the adornment of rosettes, garlands, and ormolu were four rows of twenty-five drawers each to store the empress’s “bits and pieces.”6 (Roentgen’s cabinets are still used to store Catherine’s carved gems at the State Hermitage Museum.)
Though Catherine prized her antique stones the most, she also assembled a large contemporary collection. Catering to the craze for everything neoclassical, Rome-based engravers made replicas of famous ancient gems and sculptures. Dominating the Rome gem trade was the celebrated Pichler family. Patriarch Antonio Pichler specialized in copying ancient gems. His son Giovanni followed in his footsteps, as did Giovanni’s son Giacomo, and half brothers Giuseppe and Luigi. Of the dynasty, Luigi was the most renowned, enjoying commissions from the Vatican and French and Austrian courts. Naturally, Catherine was a huge fan.
In 1781, Catherine instructed fellow gem lover Prince Nikolai Yusupov to “Give the carved gems to be engraved to Pichler, Weder, and Marchand. The subjects? I shall note them on a separate sheet . . .”7 Weder, a German engraver working in Rome, created fifteen pieces for the empress, including a sardonyx cameo of Peter the Great wearing a laurel wreath. Catherine also ordered portraits of herself from over a dozen other European masters and foreign and Russian engravers working in St. Petersburg. Over fifty of these cameos and intaglios portraits of Catherine survive; some thirty are at the State Hermitage Museum.
When Catherine discovered the talented Brown brothers in 1786, her gem collection already neared 10,000 pieces. She bought 180 of the London engravers’ cameos and intaglios—half their entire output. William favored portraits; his younger brother Charles preferred animal and sporting themes. Once or twice a year, the Browns shipped Catherine their newest miniature artworks. Playing to Catherine’s love for antiquity, the brothers depicted historic events in allegorical form.
A two-layered pink-gray sardonyx cameo features a figure of the winged goddess of Victory (Russia) with her foot on a half-moon (Turkey); another has Catherine placing a wreath on the head of Potemkin, shown as a Roman general carrying a curved sword and half-moon. The striking golden brown topaz intaglio, On Catherine’s Recovery from Illness, features Asclepius and Hygieia holding a medallion with the empress’s portrait.
Known as “engravers of cupids,” the Browns also sent Catherine over a dozen pieces starring the eternally young god of love. Catherine later acquired another charming Cupid from the Saint-Moryce collection through Alphones Miliotti. In the sardonyx intaglio Cupid Sailing on His Quiver, Romain-Vincent Jeuffroy shows young Cupid in a windsurfing pose, using one of his arrows as a mast. Jeuffroy, director of the Paris mint and knight of the Legion of Honor, was one of France’s leading stone engravers.8
With demand for signed gems soaring, replicas passed off as originals became a serious problem for collectors. To address the issue, Catherine ordered over 5,000 casts of the most famous ancient and modern gemstones from Scottish chemist James Tassie. With Catherine’s patronage, Tassie was able to gain access to more gem collections across Europe, eventually creating some 15,800 casts. He made two copies of each cast for Catherine, in white enamel and a colored glass that imitated the original gemstone. Arranged according to subject and chronology, Tassie’s casts arrived in St. Petersburg between 1783 and 1788 in four special wood cabinets.
Catherine used Tassie’s replicas both to learn about her competitors’ collections and check her acquisitions. This proved invaluable in 1786 when she bought half the collection of Lord Algernon Percy from Alnwick Castle, Northumberland. By consulting Tassie’s casts from Alnwick, Catherine discovered the Earl had “kept back several good stones” she’d paid for.9 “We have cabinets with a number of drawers designed for carved gems which you wish to augment by adding the items from the Orleans collection,” she wrote Grimm. “But beware of a substitution, such as already happened to us in the case of Percy. Now we have the collection of casts by Tassie which will easily reveal such a fraud.”10
As Catherine’s secretary Adrian Gribovsky describes, the empress incorporated cameos into her daily routine. “On normal days in the Winter Palace the Empress would rise at seven and work in her mirrored study until nine, mostly composing statutes for the Senate. At ten she would go to her room . . . for an audience until twelve. The Empress would then go to her small study to dress her hair. This lasted no longer than a quarter of an hour. At this time her grandchildren came to wish her good day,” he wrote.
“After dressing she spent the time until lunch reading books or making molds of cameos which she sometimes presented as gifts. At two o’clock she would sit down at table. After lunch she read her foreign correspondence, worked on legislation or copied her cameos. The evening assembly began at six o’clock in her apartments or the Hermitage Theater. By ten everyone had left and by eleven the Empress had retired for the night.”11
In addition to Alexander Mamonov, Catherine’s daughter-in-law caught her “cameo fever.” With the help of imperial gem cutter Karl von Leberecht, Maria Feodorovna became an accomplished carver. For Catherine’s sixtieth birthday, the grand duchess gave her a veined gray-pink Siberian jasper cameo depicting her as Minerva in a helmet topped with a laurel wreath and winged sphinx. On another occasion, Catherine was thrilled with her daughter-in-law’s “charming and touching” opaline glass cameo featuring carved profiles of her “adorable children.”
In September, Catherine sent Grimm engravings of Maria Feodorovna’s cameo. “Here, long-suffering Sir, are two prints of the six urchins, who are growing before one’s very eyes. In body, as in heart and spirit, Monsieur Alexander is of a rare beauty, goodness and understanding; lively and composed, quick and reflective, with deep thoughts and singular ease in all he does . . . in a word, that boy is a mass of contradictions, which makes him peculiarly dear to all around him. . . . When Alexander is ill . . . he surrounds himself with the arts: engravings, medals and copies of intaglios are his amusements.”12