Pavlovsk Palace

[2] In 1780, Catherine the Great loaned her official architect, the Scotsman Charles Cameron, to design a palace on a hillside overlooking the Slavyanka River, near the site of Marienthal.

It was placed at the entrance of the park, and it was made of porous limestone with a coarse finish; the surfaces suggest that they had been aged by centuries of weather.

[4] Maria Feodorovna also insisted in having several rustic structures which recalled the palace where she grew up at Étupes, forty miles from Basel, in what was then the Duchy of Württemberg and today is in Alsace.

For the palace itself, Cameron conceived a country house which seems to have been based on a design by Andrea Palladio shown in a woodcut in his book I quattro libri dell'architettura, for the Villa Capra "La Rotonda" near Vicenza in Italy.

[5] In September 1781, as construction of the Pavlovsk Palace began, Paul and Maria set off on a journey to Austria, Italy, France and Germany.

During their travels they saw the palaces and French gardens of Versailles and Chantilly, which strongly influenced the future appearance of Pavlovsk Park.

While they traveled, they kept in contact almost daily with Kuchelbecker, the supervisor of construction at Pavlovsk, sending back and forth drawings, plans and notes on the smallest details.

Maria Feodorovna in turn was annoyed by the bright polychrome decoration and Pompeian arabesques used by Cameron, and wanted more delicate colors, and Paul did not like anything that resembled the style of his mother's house, the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo.

He made the Italian hall into a replica of a Roman temple, and he built the State Bedroom for Maria Feodorovna as an imitation of the state bedroom of the King of France, with a huge gilded bed, and cream silk wallpaper painted in tempura with colorful flowers, fruit, musical instruments and gardening tools.

Another disaster struck Pavlovsk in 1803; a fire caused by a defective chimney destroyed a major part of the interior of the palace, including all the decor of the State Apartments and living rooms.

[citation needed] Maria Feodorovna brought Cameron and Brenna's young assistant, the Italian architect Carlo Rossi, to help restore the Palace.

Following the French taste of the time for Egyptian art, he added black Egyptian statues in the entry vestibule of the Palace, He redesigned the Greek and Italian halls, replacing the molding on the walls with false marble, and he added a Russian touch; fireplaces faced with Russian lapis-lazuli and jasper, which had originally been in the Mikhailovsky Palace that Paul had built in St. Petersburg.

The Rose Pavilion was the site of a grand fete on 12 July 1814, celebrating the return of Alexander I to St. Petersburg after the defeat of Napoleon.

For the occasion, architect Pietro de Gottardo Gonzaga built a ballroom the size of the Rose Pavilion itself in just seventeen days, and surrounded it with huge canvases of Russian villagers celebrating the victory.

The ball inside the pavilion opened with a Polonaise led by Alexander and his mother, and ended with a huge display of fireworks.

In her later years Maria Feodorovna had a literary salon at Pavlovsk, which was frequented by poet Vasily Zhukovsky, fabulist Ivan Krylov, and historian Nikolai Karamzin.

[citation needed] The last great St. Petersburg architect to work at Pavlovsk was Carlo Rossi, who in 1824 designed the library, which contained more than twenty thousand books as well as collections of rare coins and butterflies.

He also designed the Corner Salon, where Maria Feodorovna received guests such as the first American Ambassador to Russia, John Quincy Adams, and the Lavender Room, whose walls were made of lilac-colored false marble, matching the lilac flowers outside the windows.

These rooms were furnished with furniture made of native Russian woods, including Karelian birch, poplar and walnut.

[citation needed] At the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917, the eldest son of Constantine Constantinovich, Prince Ioann Konstantinovich of Russia, along with his wife, Princess Helen of Serbia, the daughter of King Peter I of Serbia, were living in one of the wings of Pavlovsk, together with his father's widowed sister Queen Olga of Greece.

When Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917, Polovtsoff went to the Winter Palace, found Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Commissar of Enlightenment of the new government, and demanded that Pavlovsk be saved as a museum.

He hired former soldiers to guard the house, put all the furniture into the main building, made an inventory of all the treasures in the Palace, and successfully resisted demands from various revolutionary committees for dishes, chairs, tables, and all the books from the library.

The Roman and Greek antiquities were too heavy and delicate to move, so they were taken to the basements, placed as close together as possible, and then hidden by a brick wall.

Also, fragments of the original interior molding, cornices, friezes and the frames for the carvings, bas-reliefs, medallions and paintings still remained, and could be copied.

The twelve thousand pieces of furniture and art objects removed from their original places, from paintings and tapestries to water pitchers and glasses, had to be put back where they belonged.

Cameron laid out a triple alley of five straight rows of Linden trees, imported from Lübeck, in a long axis from the courtyard of the Palace, leading to a small semi-circular place in the forest.

In the forest to the left of this axis he placed a romantic thatch-roofed dairy with stalls for two cows modeled after the one in the park of Württemberg where Maria Feodorovna had grown up; and on the other side of the parade route, an aviary, filled with parakeets, nightingales, starlings, and quail.

An Italian garden, with parterres, classical statues and a grand staircase was created by Brenna on the hillside overlooking the lake.

He laid out paths and changed contours to create the effects he wanted, using open and closed spaces and different colors and shapes of trees to make theatrical scenes.

[22] In 1822-1824 the architect Carlo Rossi built a library over the Gallery with large arched windows framed with rosettes ornaments.