Saint Michael's Castle

Saint Michael's Castle was built as a residence for Emperor Paul I of Russia by architects Vincenzo Brenna and Vasily Bazhenov in 1797–1801.

Saint Michael's Castle was built to the south of the Summer Garden and replaced the small wooden palace of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna.

Due to his personal fascination with medieval knights and his constant fear of assassination, the new royal residence was built like a castle around an octagonal courtyard.

The building was approached from Italian Street through triple semi-circular gates, the middle passage of which was reserved for members of the imperial family.

Behind them was a broad, straight avenue, along which were built the stables and the manège[a] It ended at the three-storey corridor pavilions, beyond which the forecourt fortifications began.

The development of the composition of the new imperial residence, through a series of variations, led to a square block with an octagonal courtyard which recalls both the round Villa Farnese Palace in Caprarola and its pentagonal external silhouette, by the architect Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola.

The main south façade of the castle follows the arch of the Porte Saint-Denis in Paris, built-in 1672 according to the design of François Blondel the Elder, the founder of French classicism.

[11] Statues in the niches of the southern facade of Saint Michael's Castle are personifications, symbolic of the virtues of the ideal monarch.

The architecture of the colonnade of the state passage through the southern gate and the main staircase of Saint Michael's Castle correlates with similar compositions from Baroque Western Europe, such as the Royal Palace of Caserta near Naples by Luigi Vanvitelli.

The classicist elements, together with Romantic ones, make up a peculiar "costumed architecture" in Saint Michael's Castle, which anticipates the Empire style of the early nineteenth century.