The northern Palmyra: Saint Petersburg at three hundred

Magazine Antiques, March, 2003 by Karen L. Kettering

This year the city of Saint Petersburg will be celebrating the three-hundredth anniversary of its founding. In honor of this momentous anniversary, Hillwood Museum and Gardens is presenting its first temporary exhibition, The Myths of St. Peteraburg: Impresjions of the City fro the Hillwood Collection, which will be on view until December 31. One of Russia's most important cultural centers and the nation's capital from 1712 to 1918, the city is intimately linked to the creation and history of thousands of objects in Hillwood's collections. For this reason the museums board and staff decided that it was imperative to tell the story of Saint Petersburg in a separate space, where visitors could focus entirely on this fascinating place and how Russians have interpreted the meaning of its existence.

From its founding in 1703, Petersburg, as it was sometimes called, was much more than a new capital 'with convenient access to the sea. Over the last three centuries, it has become a lightning rod for some of Russia's most fundamental debates about the nation's past and future. Promoters viewed Peter I's precisely planned city with its long straight avenues radiating from the city's core as a center of science, rationalism, culture, and secularism that was far superior to the medieval, obscurantist Moscow with its dark, winding, muddy lanes and hundreds of churches. For detractors, including some of Peter's own heirs, the city "founded on tears and bones" (1)--a reference to the slave laborers who built the earliest structures--was a cold and depressing site, symbolic of Peter's wrongheaded and even cruel attempt to divert Russia from her "natural" political, cultural, religious, and historical destiny. They promoted Moscow instead, with its ancient Kremlin and historic churches, as the true spiritual center of the nation.

Peter the Great founded the city where the Neva River empties into the Gulf of Finland. He envisioned the marshy and inhospitable land, won only after a long struggle against the Swedes, as a "window to the West," both literally and figuratively. (2) His new port would connect Russia more immediately with its western neighbors and serve as a conduit for ideas and goods that would enrich his citizens intellectually and economically. However, only by force and imperial decree did the city rise from the swamp and become populated with reluctant nobles, merchants, and tradesmen ordered to move to the new city.

That Peter should have attempted the monumental task of creating a new European capital for his empire hardly surprised his contemporaries. From his youth, he had styled himself as a foreigner and an outsider. He refused to wear a beard, the traditional sign of godliness and masculinity among Orthodox Russians. Shortly after assuming sole power, he forced all men, except clergy and serfs, to do the same. Peter preferred to present himself as a warrior and conqueror in Western style armor, in a clear reference to the long wars required to win the lands on which Saint Petersburg was built. Hillwood's marble bust (PL II) depicts Peter as a victorious emperor with a hairstyle reminiscent of busts of the Caesars. His armor resembling the Roman muscle cuirass is decorated with mythological sea creatures, reminding the viewer of his zeal to create a navy and establish Russia as a sea power.

Peter also forced his citizens to adopt (or at least appear to adopt) new religious and political ideas, new forms of art and architecture, and foreign customs of dressing, dining, and socializing. In previous centuries, Russian men and women had not dined together at diplomatic banquets or at celebrations in the houses of the elite. In 1718 Peter decreed that Saint Petersburg's wealthiest and foreign citizens had to open their houses for mixed-sex "assemblies" at which Russian noblewomen, now required to wear scandalously low-cut dresses in the French style, socialized with unfamiliar men in an atmosphere of drinking, card-playing, smoking, and dancing the minuet. One can only imagine how awkward these lessons in continental practices were for both students and teachers. But, as many objects in Hillwood's collection indicate, they were clearly successful. Russia's nobility rapidly abandoned traditional drinking vessels for ornately engraved goblets (see P1. III) created by foreign craftsmen working in the Sa int Petersburg Glassworks, who were attracted by the premiums paid in Russia to producers of luxury goods. (3) Their employment agreements required that they train a number of Russian students and thus eliminate the need to import outside specialists.

After Peter's death in 1725, the city continued to grow with hardly a pause. His daughter Empress Elizabeth Petrovna, who came to power in 1741, followed her father's basic plan for the city but added a heavy dose of the rococo. To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Saint Petersburg in 1753, the government commissioned a series of the most splendid views" of the capital. The complex project was awarded to two members of the Academy of Sciences and Art, Mikhail Ivanovich Makbaev, a specialist in cartography and typography, and the Venetian Giuseppe Valeriani, a professor of drawing, perspective, and optics. (4) The resulting sweeping views, engraved by printmakers at the academy demonstrated how Elizabeth had extended and improved some of the most distinctive aspects of her father's city plan.