Catherine the Great is one of history’s most compelling figures: a tenacious German princess who seized Russia’s throne from her husband just days before his “accidental” strangulation. Inspired initially by the progressive ideas of the French Enlightenment, Catherine II went on to rule her adopted country for thirty-four years in a less-than-enlightened fashion—crushing the Turks, peasant rebellions, and any other Romanovs with claims to the throne. Outwitting her political rivals, she transformed Russia from a northern backwater to global superpower, snatching large parts of Poland and annexing the strategic Crimea Peninsula—the basis for Vladimir Putin’s recent land grab. Styling herself heir to her illustrious grandfather-in-law, Peter the Great, she Westernized Russia while celebrating its language, religion, and history.
Catherine shocked contemporaries with her sexually liberated lifestyle—from extramarital affairs and illegitimate children to a string of official favorites. “God grant us our desires, and grant them speedily” was her favorite toast, a reference to her cougar-like appetite for handsome young men. With enough power, intrigue, and passion for several lifetimes, Catherine II has been the subject of numerous biographies. Volumes of what she called her “scribbling”—including three memoirs and correspondence with philosophers, art advisers, and favorites—have given historians plenty of material to work with. Writing in French, German, and Russian, Catherine reveals public and private personas often at odds—at once imposing and down-to-earth, extravagant and hardworking, sensual and prudish, witty and emotionally needy.
Focused on Catherine’s brazen imperialism and sensational private life, historians have paid less attention to her other passion—arguably her most lasting legacy and the area in which she triumphed as an enlightened ruler. Catherine the Great was one of history’s greatest patrons of art and architecture, both in scale and quality. Under her patronage, Russia experienced a cultural renaissance the likes of which Europe hadn’t seen since the reign of England’s Charles I. Her unprecedented spending spree brought thousands of Old Master paintings, sculptures, furniture, silver, porcelain, and engraved gems to Russia. She left her adopted country the world-class Hermitage Museum and transformed Russia’s swampy capital into a sophisticated cultural center.
From the start, Catherine mobilized art and architecture to legitimize her shaky claim to rule and reinvent herself as Russia’s enlightened ruler. Knowing that paintings were synonymous with power, Catherine quickly amassed a collection of the stature that had taken France, Austria, and Saxony’s royal houses centuries to assemble. By snatching up entire collections once owned by Europe’s rich and powerful, she declared Russia’s ascending wealth and prestige. To enhance her court’s cachet, Catherine entertained frequently and lavishly. If the French court was dining on Roettiers silver and Sèvres porcelain at Versailles, she would set an even more magnificent table for her guests at the Winter Palace.
As G. N. Komelova writes, “Her absolute power allowed her to use the arts and architecture as a weapon of state policy, for self-glorification and self-assertion. Indeed her patronage of the arts was crucial to fostering her image as an enlightened monarch.”1 Catherine herself contributed to the view that her collecting was purely political. Early on, she described her collecting compulsion: “It’s not for the love of art, but for voracity. I’m not a connoisseur, I’m a glutton.”2 The empress agreed with Austria’s Prince de Ligne that she had mediocre taste and “no conception of either painting or music.”3
In fact, Catherine applied the same energy and ambition to art and architecture that she did to governing. The “glutton” soon bought Ligne’s art collection. She read widely on art and architecture, collected engravings and drawings, and even produced her own architectural drawings. An armchair traveler, Catherine turned to her exquisite albums of prints and engravings for inspiration—from an exact replica of Raphael’s Vatican Loggia for the Winter Palace to Josiah Wedgwood’s “Green Frog Service” decorated with hundreds of views of England. Combining her knowledge of antiquity and passion for engraved gems, Catherine ordered the extraordinary Sèvres Cameo Service with mythological and historical scenes. Before long, Catherine was offering advice to her talented art scouts.
Catherine’s collecting debut came in 1764, the same year she placed her former lover, Stanislaus Poniatowski, on Poland’s throne. Motivated more by revenge than connoisseurship, she plucked up a paintings collection earmarked for Prussia’s Frederick the Great. Though the works turned out to be mixed in quality, their arrival in St. Petersburg inspired Catherine to launch an imperial picture gallery. Impatient for masterworks, Catherine set her agents loose in the auction houses of Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam—connoisseurs like Russian diplomat Dmitry Golitsyn, Denis Diderot, and Frederic Melchior Grimm. In addition to buying Old Masters, Catherine’s scouts commissioned contemporary artworks on her behalf—from Jean-Antoine Houdon’s sculptures of Voltaire and history paintings by Sir Joshua Reynolds to neoclassical pictures by Anton Raphael Mengs and Angelica Kauffman.
Catherine collected on a scale so shocking that England and France issued laws forbidding the export of large quantities of art. For more than three decades, she pursued art as a form of diplomatic warfare using the same cunning tactics and surprise attacks of her military. An opportunist, she exploited the misfortunes of others—including those of political rivals Frederick the Great and the Duc de Choiseul, France’s anti-Russian war minister. By targeting the cash-strapped heirs of celebrated private collectors, Catherine amassed the prestigious collections of “Saxon Richelieu” Heinrich von Brühl, France’s treasurer Pierre Crozat, and England’s longest-serving prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole.
Adding to Europe’s anxiety, Catherine was snatching up its art treasures at the same time she was grabbing territory. Two wars against the Ottoman Empire in 1768–74 and 1787–92, and the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 1783 gave Russia a foothold in southeastern Europe and the northern shores of the Black Sea. Three partitions of Poland added another 185,000 square miles to Catherine’s empire, including much of Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania, and increased Russia’s population from 23 to 37 million. Russia became a global naval and commercial power and Catherine found herself running one of the world’s wealthiest empires.
As she did with art, Catherine used architecture to increase Russia’s prestige. She began by constructing granite quays on the Neva’s mud-clogged banks. “Building is a devilish affair,” Catherine confided to her Paris-based agent Melchior Grimm. “It eats money and the more one builds, the more one wants to go on; it is an illness like drunkenness.”4 To display her growing artworks in stylish fashion, Catherine added the Small and Large Hermitages to the Winter Palace.
The years between 1775 and 1787 mark a period of peace for Russia and the height of Catherine’s extraordinary building binge. To reinvent Russia’s image, she established a building commission and personally reviewed and approved some 300 projects. With an innate sense for trends, Catherine championed neoclassicism, a movement inspired by the discovery and excavations of the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. To Catherine, neoclassicism was refined, elegant, virtuous, and monumental—the opposite of the ornate baroque and rococo styles of her predecessors. Thanks to her sponsorship and influence as a tastemaker, classical buildings soon lined the Neva.
Neoclassicism was also the perfect complement to Catherine’s political ambitions. She saw herself as protector of the Byzantine heritage and a champion of antiquity, responsible for the continuance of the artistic ideals of the ancient Greeks. The ultimate aim of her two wars with the Turks was the “Greek Project”—an unrealized plan to drive the Turks from Constantinople and resurrect a Greek Christian empire on the Mediterranean. A sense of belonging to European culture inspired Catherine’s fascination with the ancient world—one she recreated in numerous buildings and monuments.
To achieve her goal, Catherine imported European architects who created a style known as Russian Classicism. Among the most talented was Italian Giacomo Quarenghi, who created many of her most beautiful buildings. These include the Neva suite of staterooms at the Winter Palace, the Hermitage Theatre and the Raphael Loggia, and the Alexander Palace, Catherine’s wedding gift for her grandson. Superbly generous with her favorites, Catherine also commissioned the Marble Palace and Gatchina for Gregory Orlov, and Tauride Palace for Gregory Potemkin. After the deaths of many of her lovers, Catherine bought back her extravagant gifts from their heirs—from palaces and paintings to porcelain and silver.
At Tsarskoe Selo, the Romanov’s summer retreat south of St. Petersburg, Catherine hired Scottish architect Charles Cameron to redo her private apartments inside Catherine Palace (named for Peter the Great’s second wife, Catherine I). Adjacent to the vast palace, Cameron added the Agate Pavilion, a luxurious spa complex with ground floor baths and an upstairs suite of richly furnished rooms lined in jasper and amber. Nearby, busts of Greek and Roman notables decorated the Cameron Gallery, where Catherine enjoyed views of her park—including a lake representing the Black Sea and a replica of Constantinople.
Catherine filled her new palaces with decorative art from the most prestigious foreign artisans. Though the empress disliked the French monarchy for interfering with her political ambitions, she was a Francophile when it came to Gobelins tapestries, Sèvres porcelain, Roettiers silver, and Auguste gold. Hundreds of pieces of masterly furniture arrived from the workshop of celebrated German craftsman David Roentgen. Catherine also kept St. Petersburg’s jewelers busy—from the imperial regalia and diamond-studded snuffboxes to gems to decorate her military dress uniforms. Of all her collections, Catherine was most smitten with carved gems. Contracting what she called “cameo fever,” Catherine amassed some 10,000 antique and Renaissance cameos and intaglios, one of the world’s finest collections.
Art collecting, begun as a shrewd political calculation, grew into a passion. Catherine was still collecting at the end of her life, taking advantage of the flooded art market caused by the French Revolution. When she died in 1796, Russia’s imperial art collection boasted some 4,000 Old Master paintings, 10,000 drawings, 10,000 engraved gems, and thousands of decorative objects. Catherine’s successors tried to follow in her very large footsteps. While the 19th century saw continued growth for art and architecture in Russia, the 20th century proved catastrophic.
The nationalization of private and imperial art collections following the 1917 Revolution added to the Hermitage’s vast holdings. But by the late 1920s, the cash-strapped Soviet government raided the museum. In just under five years, over 24,000 pieces were sold overseas, including Fabergé eggs, crown jewels, porcelain, sculptures, and paintings. Among these treasures were many of Catherine’s paintings. Fifty masterpieces vanished from the Hermitage. Twenty-one of these landed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., secretly acquired from the Soviets by U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon.
The opening of the National Gallery in 1941 coincided with the start of the Nazi’s 900-day Siege of Leningrad, one of history’s deadliest occupations. Among the many efforts to preserve Russia’s cultural heritage was the evacuation of Hermitage treasures to the Urals and the battle to save the historic ensemble of buildings. After World War II, the tables were turned and the Soviets looted art in Germany. Since then, Russia has spent decades restoring many of Catherine’s damaged palaces.
Despite the trauma and losses of the last century, St. Petersburg and the State Hermitage Museum continue to embody Catherine’s extraordinary patronage. The empress would surely have been pleased by the three million-plus visitors from around the world who poured through her museum in 2014, the 250th anniversary of her first paintings acquisition from Berlin.
Fate may have brought Catherine to Russia, but as she noted in her memoirs, “Fortune is not as blind as people imagine. It is often the result of a long series of precise and self-chosen steps. . . .” Here, then, is the story of her remarkable artistic journey.