It can’t be done; therefore I shall do it.” In 1703, Peter the Great famously opened “a window on to Europe” by founding St. Petersburg at the mouth of the Neva on the coast of the Baltic. Located just five hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle, the land he wrested from Sweden was inhospitable at best—marshy swampland and waterways frozen five months of the year. With near maniacal obsession, Peter forced workers north to consolidate the riverbanks and build houses, shipyards, arms factories, brickyards, and sawmills. As in Amsterdam, the new buildings were supported by tree trunks sunk into the muddy ground. In the process, some 100,000 construction serfs and construction workers, including Swedish prisoners of war, died from exhaustion and disease, giving St. Petersburg the name “the city built on bones.”
Nine years after the foundations were laid, Peter moved Russia’s capital one thousand miles north from Moscow to St. Petersburg, and ordered everyone to follow. To ensure his new capital rivaled the European capitals he’d visited, Peter invited Western architects, artists, and craftsmen. Aristocratic families like the Shuvalovs, Shermetevs, Yusopovs, and Stroganovs built mansions along the Neva and its tributaries. With the tsar’s input, Domenico Trezzini designed the imperial Summer Palace, along with the spired Peter and Paul Cathedral (where Peter and his successors would be buried). Since Peter wanted his capital to be fireproof and stone had to be shipped at a huge expense from other areas of Russia, kilns were quickly fired up. To maximize stone for St. Petersburg, Peter ordered a moratorium on masonry construction throughout the rest of the empire. Brick, tile, glass, and cement were also produced in great quantity.
Peter personally chose the location of many of St. Petersburg’s most important buildings, including the heart of the capital, the Admiralty, with a 230-foot-tall tower topped by a weathervane in the form of a crown and ship. From this landmark, three main radial streets fanned southward intersecting a series of canals. The northeastern most of these streets, Nevsky Prospect, became St. Petersburg’s main thoroughfare. There was a uniform plan to the city, and the early architecture was simple and utilitarian, with wood and brick houses plastered and painted to look like stone. After centuries of isolation, direct trade with Europe was now possible thanks to the creation of the empire’s largest port. “In the history of the art of urban planning in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, there is nothing can be compared with Russia’s northern capital,” write Dmitry Shvidkovsky and Yulia Revzina. “No other European country, whether on their home territories or in their colonies, had tried to found a city on such a scale, let alone the capital of an empire.”1
But in the six decades since its founding, St. Petersburg’s appearance had been spoiled by muddy banks, wooden docks, and rundown pilings. Determined to change that, Catherine hired architect Yury Velten (the son of Peter the Great’s chef) in 1763 to finish the two-mile-long Palace Embankment with Finnish red granite. In the 1770s and 1780s, Velten completed the ambitious project, facing twenty-four more miles of riverbank and the walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress, creating a unified look and handsome backdrop for Catherine’s buildings. “The Neva is dressed up in granite/the bridges hang across the water/the islands are covered in dark green orchards,” wrote Alexander Pushkin a generation later.2
The Neva Embankment was just the start of Catherine’s dramatic makeover of St. Petersburg. The discovery of the ancient Roman cities Herculaneum and Pompeii in 1738 and 1748 had unleashed a craze across Europe for classically inspired architecture. Not only was Catherine aware of the power of architecture to express Russia’s wealth and prestige, she realized the benefit of linking her reign with the very latest architectural style. Allocating vast resources for construction, Catherine shifted her hand-picked team of architects away from Empress Elizabeth’s baroque and rococo styles toward the more refined neoclassicism. “I am building, I will build, and will encourage others to build . . . ,” she wrote in 1766.
Before she was done, Catherine lined the capital with neoclassical palaces, mansions, churches, and public buildings, transforming St. Petersburg into Russia’s political, cultural, and economic center. The empress became a self-described building addict. “As you know,” she wrote Melchior Grimm, “the building frenzy is as powerful as ever with us, and hardly any earthquake can have knocked down as many buildings as we are putting up . . . building is a devilish thing: it devours money, and the more you build, the more you want to build; it is a sickness, like drinking, or else it’s a sort of habit.”3
Catherine’s urban planning extended beyond Russia’s capital. Less than three months into her reign, she established a Commission for the Construction of St. Petersburg and Moscow to give Russia “a more European appearance” and bring architectural uniformity to its cities. Catherine actively collaborated with her architects, reviewing and approving over three hundred projects across Russia. To lure skilled construction workers, she ordered advertisements placed in foreign newspapers. Tver, the first town to be redone in 1763, became a model for Archangel and Kazan. After the center of Tver burned down, Catherine’s commission took over, creating a prototype for towns with a main street that ran into two big squares—one for administrative buildings and the other for shops. To reduce the fire risk, side streets were required to be 75 feet wide. In 1765, the Commission sponsored a competition for a plan for St. Petersburg. The winning plan featured broad straight thoroughfares for the capital intersected by beautiful squares. Wooden structures were banned, as were residences taller than the Winter Palace.
One of Catherine’s most important early public commissions was a new home for St. Petersburg’s Academy of Fine Arts. Though the Academy had been founded by Empress Elizabeth in 1757 to foster Russian talent, Catherine relaunched the institution to signal her enlightened rule. In 1764, Catherine reorganized the Academy after the prestigious Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris that had centralized authority for the arts and imposed a standard of taste in France. St. Petersburg’s Academy adopted France’s hierarchy of genres which ranked history painting first, followed by portraiture, landscape, and genre painting. According to Rosalind Gray, Catherine liked the idea of a constant supply of official art to glorify her reign.4
Catherine commissioned Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe and Alexander Kokorinov to design a new home for the Academy near Peter the Great’s Kunstkammer. In June 1765, the third anniversary of her accession, Catherine’s court, diplomatic corps, scholars, painters, and writers turned out for the groundbreaking ceremony. On the roof of the Academy’s neoclassical building stood a statue of Minerva, with a face resembling Catherine’s. Above the conference hall, a small cupola housed Ivan Prokoviev’s statue of Catherine. To mark the opening, poet Alexander Sumarokov wrote: “Our descendants will see you, Petropolis, in a new guise—you will be the Rome of the North . . . you will become . . . a timeless monument to Peter the First and Catherine the Second. Your architecture will serve a most useful purpose, for it will give a glorious example to other cities.”5
To promote Russian art, the Academy launched public exhibitions after the famous Parisian Salons. The inaugural exhibition in August 1762 became an annual event from 1765 on, opening each year on June 28, the anniversary of Catherine’s accession. The empress was a regular at the weeklong exhibition capped by a public award assembly. Ironically, the institution founded to cultivate homegrown talent was dominated by French faculty, including de la Mothe. Despite Catherine’s patronage of the Academy and support of Russian portraitists, she proceeded to fill the Hermitage with foreign art. Surprisingly, she owned just two Russian paintings.
English scholar William Coxe was among the empress’s critics. “The sovereign may rear artists, like foreign plants in a hot bed, at a prodigious expence, [sic] and by constant cultivation; but unless the same care is continued when they are brought to maturity, they will sicken by neglect,” wrote Coxe in the 1770s. “. . . If those who excel are not distinguished, they cannot feel that noble spirit of emulation which excites to excellence. As the nation, however, is gradually drawing towards a higher state of civilization and refinement; these institutions must be productive of more extensive and permanent effects.”6
Catherine soon tapped de la Mothe and Velten for a highly personal commission at the Winter Palace. Before the Berlin paintings arrived at the palace, Catherine had assembled a gallery in the mezzanine of her private apartments. The diamond room, dressing room, bedroom, boudoir, study, and library had just been elegantly redone in the early neoclassical style, heated with handsome stoves decorated with painted and gilded tiles. From Catherine’s private rooms, a staircase led to the entresols and Chinese Rooms. While beautiful, these rooms were too small for entertaining and showing off her rapidly expanding painting collection.
Just east of the Winter Palace, Velten designed a two-story addition overlooking the courtyard. Known as the South Pavilion, the new wing featured luxe first floor apartments for Gregory Orlov connected to Catherine’s rooms by a private passage. To this, Vallin de la Mothe built a Neva-facing North Pavilion to house Catherine’s pictures. The Frenchman lightened the austere three-story façade with tall window lintels and semicircular tops along with sculptures of Flora and Pomona (goddesses of flowers and fruit). Together, the North and South Pavilions became known as the Small Hermitage after the French ermitage, meaning a quiet place or a hermit’s dwelling. The name would later extend to the whole complex of buildings adjoining the Winter Palace. Joining the pavilions was a Hanging Garden above the former imperial stables. Over the garden’s vaulted ceiling, workers installed a rolled lead roof covered with soil and planted with trees and shrubs. As an extension of the Hanging Garden, Catherine also built a glassed-in Winter Garden.
“A great number of parrots and other birds from different parts of the world are kept in this winter garden,” wrote Johann Georgi, “likewise there are good local song birds, wild hens etc. which, in their majority, all fly about freely and nest in the gallery’s shrubbery, except for the big ones on a tether. . . . Sometimes in the summer, for the sake of fresh air, the birds are placed in a special section made of wire netting so that it seems as if they were in the open air. Suchlike diversity of the fine birds and the simultaneous singing of the local ones etc is quite entertaining. Typically there are also some small animals here, fine monkeys, rabbits, white guinea pigs etc, roaming about free or on a leash.”7 But the entertaining birds took a toll on the art. One of Catherine’s advisers observed that her marble figure of Love was covered with bird droppings.
Catherine hosted her first reception in the Small Hermitage in February 1769, inviting the English ambassador and his wife to dinner. From Orlov’s apartments, Catherine and her guests proceeded to the Small Hermitage where they played cards until 10 P.M. and then dined until midnight. Three more Hermitage luncheons followed that month and became regular events in the fall and winter. Several times a month Catherine held Hermitages for sixty to eighty guests. Foreign ministers, generals, courtiers, and ladies-in-waiting attended Catherine’s Grands Hermitages enjoying Italian opera, balls, and banquets. Though the empress described herself as tone deaf (she reportedly had to be given a sign when to applaud), concerts, opera, and ballet became an obligatory part of life at court.
In contrast to her large official balls, Petite Hermitages offered Catherine an escape from official duties. These invitation-only Thursday night dinners featured dinner, charades, poetry readings, dances, and conversations about art. The exclusive A-list included the Count de Ségur; Count Cobenzl; Prince de Ligne; field marshals Princes Golitsyn, Shuvalov, and Stroganov; and Princesses Dashkova and Branitskaya. One of Catherine’s favorite entertainments was the literary game, consisting of scrambled questions and answers composed by members of her coterie and read out loud.
Art formed the perfect backdrop for Catherine’s soirées, inspiring conversation among guests. “The appearance of this Hermitage did not fully correspond to its name,” observed Ségur, “since on its threshold the beholder’s eyes are struck by the enormous scale of its halls and galleries, the wealth of its furnishings and decoration, the multitude of paintings by Great Masters and by the pleasant ‘winter garden,’ whose green foliage, flowers and birdsong appear to have brought Italian springtime to the snowy North. The outstanding library seems to suggest that the Hermit of these halls prefers the illumination of philosophy to monastic privations. A history of the world in portraits is also to be found in a comprehensive collection of medals representing all races of mankind from all centuries.”8
With candles burning and a quartet of musicians playing, Catherine invited her guests into the dining room, decorated with ninety of her Berlin paintings. To insure privacy, Catherine dismissed the servants. An invisible system of pulleys and trap doors hoisted dishes from the kitchen below on a table volant, or flying table (an invention used by Empress Elizabeth and Frederick the Great). “We dined at a mechanical table,” wrote lady-in-waiting Countess Varvara Golovina. “The plates were let down on a special rope attached to the table and beneath the plates lay a slate on which we wrote the name of that dish which we wished to receive. Then we pulled on the rope and in a little while the plates returned with the desired dish. I was overcome with admiration for this little whim.”9
To add to the informality, Catherine and her guests spoke Russian and wore Russian-style dress, whereas in the formal settings of court or state functions, they would speak French and wear Western-style clothing. With characteristic humor, Catherine posted special rules of behavior in the gallery connecting the Winter Palace and Small Hermitage. “Titles should be left at the door like hats, the more so swords, seniority and arrogance; guests should make merry but nevertheless not spoil, crush or gnaw anything; they should not speak very loudly, so that the others would not have a headache; nor should they argue heedlessly, nor sigh deeply or yawn, thereby preventing others from partaking of the entertainments; they were not to drink excessively, should eat with appetite and not wash their dirty linen in public.”
Guests who violated Catherine’s rules were subject to “severe” punishment. “If any shall infringe the above, on the evidence of two witnesses, for any crime each guilty party shall drink a glass of cold water, ladies not excepted, and read a page from the Telemachida out loud [a tongue twisting poem by Vasily Trediakovsky]. Who infringes three points on one evening shall be sentenced to learn three lines from the Telemachida by heart. If any shall infringe the tenth point, he shall no longer be permitted entry.”10