Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli

Paper Summary:

Before the end of Elizabeth's reign, St. Petersburg had become Russia's capital in a much larger sense than in Peter the Great's time. This paper discusses how palaces built by Rastrelli gave the city an aura of aristocratic elegance, while the great public buildings created by the Russian followers of Peter's foreign architects emphasized its importance as the center of a new empire.

From the Paper:

"Born just a few months after his sculptor father, Carlo, who had migrated from Florence to Paris, Rastrelli grew up in the dynamic world of art that had shaped the court of Louis XIV until the death of the Sun King in 1715 deprived France's artists of their greatest patron. Rather than join a legion of artists struggling to find new backers in the West, the Rastrellis set out for St. Petersburg, where the demand for men who could paint, draw, design, and carve all but guaranteed them work. From the moment the pair arrived, the elder Rastrelli was flooded with commissions. Russians still remember him as the sculptor whose full-length likeness of the Empress Anna blended "blowsy flamboyance" and "portly vulgarity" into "a bronze portrait of imposing majesty," (Marsden, p. 108) but their appreciation for his modest talent as an architect has long since faded."

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