Early in the 18th century Tsar Peter the Great founded the city of St Petersburg. Russia was beginning to open itself to Europe, and St Petersburg was the ‘window’ looking in that direction. The city took on a Western style, brought there and applied by Italian architects and an international collection of artists. Among the architects was Bartolomeo Rastrelli (c. 1700-71), the absolute leader of construction and urban planning under Tsarina Elizabeth. He created churches and imperial homes characterized by a singular version of the late baroque, fashioning hybrid but brilliant forms in which he adapted aspects of the local style to create variants that eventually composed a vast patrimony of forms. Rastrelli was of Italian origin but had grown up in France and had been living in Russia since the age of sixteen, so he can be considered a true Russian, and the style of his work became the style of Russian architecture in the middle of the 18th century. As court architect he designed the main palaces in the capital and outlying areas following an ideology that even in the late 18th century was characterized by the exaltation of the power of the state. So it was that while the rest of Europe marked the end of an epoch, Russia in the middle of the century was still at the height of its truly ‘baroque’ architecture. His grand compositions are arranged along precise axes, like elegant proofs of geometric theorems, characterized by stylistic unity with a minimum of detail in the overall conception of the building.

St Petersburg Evening

The strict hierarchy of the spaces and the obsessive repetition of architectural elements are accompanied by an uninterrupted variation in the profiles of the elements themselves. In his first mature work, the Strogonov Palace (1750-54), Rastrelli defined his personal style, presenting a giant order of strongly plastic engaged columns above a rusticated base mixed with curved cornices similar to those found on old Russian churches.