Battle of the Palaces
A bitter standoff between Catherine and Paul, her only legitimate son and heir, manifested itself in transient political and ideological conflicts, but also had a lasting, tangible impact on Russian architecture.
Both parties materialized their political statements and their understanding of sovereign power in expensive[1] construction projects involving the most illustrious architects of the period–Vasily Bazhenov, Vincenzo Brenna, Charles Cameron, Matvey Kazakov, Giacomo Quarenghi, and Ivan Starov.
Catherine's palace projects followed the neoclassical canon of the Age of Enlightenment, while Paul deliberately leaned toward emerging Romanticism.
Catherine II ascended to the throne through the murder of her husband, Peter III, when their only legitimate son, Paul, was seven years old.
[11] The choice also reflected Catherine's lifelong Greek Project,[12] the drive to take over the Black Sea Straits from the Ottomans and re-establish the Byzantine Empire with her grandson Constantine as emperor.
[13] The bitter exchange sealed Paul's tastes in favor of emerging Romanticism and, at the same time, French Baroque,[14] and sowed the seed for the "Battle of the Palaces".
Catherine signed a formal decree to raze Bazhenov's palaces and authorized Matvey Kazakov's drafts on February 17 [O.S.
[15] Bazhenov, however, made a mistake by sticking to the 1775 plans that provided for two identical palaces for Catherine and Paul centered around the public core building.
[20] More importantly, Brenna "militarized" the setting by building a Gothic folly, Bip fortress, on the ruins of actual Swedish forts of the Great Northern War.
[21] After the death of Catherine, Paul and Brenna expanded the Pavlovsk estate with real military barracks, officers' quarters and a hospital.
Paul instructed Brenna to scavenge Catherine's most recent, incomplete buildings for materials; Cameron's Rose Field Pavilion[22] (Russian: беседка на Розовом Поле), New Gallery[23] and Temple of Memory in Sophia park[24][25] disappeared without a trace, while the Chinese Village in Tsarskoye Selo lost its elaborate exterior finishes.
[26] Pella, designed by Ivan Starov, was the largest Russian imperial palace of the period, and more complex in composition than anything in Russia.
It was completed in 1789; unusually for Catherinian architecture, it combined a neoclassical ground floor and an Oriental tented belvedere with a gilded dome.
Immediately after Catherine's death, Paul ordered Pella to be demolished and materials to be reused for the construction of St. Michael's Castle in St. Petersburg.
Soon, the former palace housed nearly 900 residents,[14] including future Field Marshal von Diebitsch[14] and, ironically, retired Charles Cameron and his wife.
During the decade that separated Paul's death in 1801 and the French invasion of Russia in 1812, the Saint Petersburg court and its architects refined and modified Catherinian neoclassicism into the Russian version of the Empire style.
