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The Winter Palace: A masterpiece by Italian and French architects on Neva May 4, 2008

Posted by dodo in : Beach Resorts, Credit Card, Finland, Health Insurance, Library, Memorial, Moscow, Museum, Russia, Travellers Cheque , trackback

It is impossible to talk of the Winter Palace without first conjuring up a picture of the city of St Petersburg, now Leningrad, and of the Neva River. I know of nothing in the world more beautiful than that great expanse of limpid and tremulous water, purified by the filter of the Ladoga Lake, and constantly agitated by tiny iridescent waves, that flow impetuously between the double dam of its magnificent embankments built in the rose granite of Finland. And the powerful stream that moves between the golden needle of the Petropavlovsk Fortress and the long facade of the Winter Palace is but a very small part indeed of the great river.

After the Neva, what strikes every visitor to St Petersburg is the overall immensity of scale. The whole city has been built, it seems, with the magnificence of the Neva in mind. There is an architectural unity about it. It has style. That is why those who criticise the dimensions of the Winter Palace should, I think, look back at the history of the city’s development through the years and at the different mentalities of its rulers.

Travel GuidebookNothing remains of the first Winter Palace built for Peter the Great in 171′ in his favourite Dutch style on the site of the Hermitage Theatre, shortly after the foundation of the city in 1703. This was a modest two-storied building with a slate roof that looked out on the canal linking the Neva with the Moika River. The canal took the name of Winter Canal, or rather Winter Dyke (Zimniaia Kanavka)’from the name of the palace. The second palace was built in 1721 by the German architect, Georg Johann Mattarnovi, who came to Russia with Andreas SchlUter, the architect of the Royal Palace in Berlin. This building looked out on to the Neva itself and was still on the modest side. In fact it was also a two-storeyed house but with a central projecting pediment supported on pilasters and with a rusticated basement. Peter the Great died there in 1725.

St Petersburg was growing rapidly. Peter the Great, who favoured northern architects, summoned the Swiss-Italian architect, Domenico Tressini, who prepared the first plans for the Cathedral, for the monastery, the Alexander Nevski Lovra and the Cathedral Church of St Peter and Paul. In order to link the Admiralty with the monastery a large avenue was planned with the name of ‘ Grand Perspective’ — the future Nevski Prospect.

It was also Domenico Tressini who rebuilt the Winter Palace and doubled its size and reduced Mattarnovi’s facade to the status of an end pavilion of a more luxurious building.

The Empress Anna Ioannovna, when she returned to St Petersburg in 1732, after the capital had been transferred to Moscow during the short rule of Peter II (1727-30), moved from this still unassuming palace to the neighbouring and infinitely grander house of Count Apraxine. It was she who commissioned the Italian architect Count Bartolommeo Francesco Rastrelli to redesign the Winter Palace by incorporating in the new building another house from the northern side of the Palace Square. This was the fourth version of the palace. After the accession of the Empress Elisabeth, Rastrelli continued to alter and increase the dimensions of the Winter Palace and in 1753 he presented the Empress with an entirely new plan. The plan was accepted and work began on a scale hitherto unimaginable. The new palace was ready in T 759, shortly before. Empress Elisabeth’s death, but changes went on until 1768 and later, well into the nineties, when the work of Starov and Quarenghi, employed by Catherine the Great, gradually began to alter the character given to the interior of the palace by Rastrelli, except for the church and main staircase that remained unchanged. Work in the palace continued in the nineteenth century when Karl Ivanovich Rossi, the architect who is mainly responsible for the grandiose town planning of St Petersburg, built a gallery for the heroes of the 1812 war which was immortalised in a poem by Pushkin. Now the Winter Palace and the Hermitage are one, and both the state and private rooms are integrated into the Museum.

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The Winter Palace: A masterpiece by Italian and French architects on Neva

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