daughter.
Catherine helped design the new park. She liked flowers, shrubs, monuments, obelisks, triumphal arches, canals, and winding paths, and Busch laid these out for her. She wrote to Voltaire, “Now I love to distraction gardens in the English style, the curving lines, the gentle slopes, the ponds like lakes … and I hold in contempt straight lines.… I hate fountains that torture water and force it into a course contrary to its nature.… In a word, Anglomania rules my plantomania.” At the end of her working day, she walked in the park in a plain dress, exercising her dogs and mingling with the public, which, if decently dressed, was freely admitted. It was in the park at Tsarskoe Selo that Alexander Pushkin set the penultimate scene in his story of the Pugachev rebellion,
It was not simply her unmatched collection of paintings or the elegant neoclassical palaces she built for herself and others that made Catherine’s reputation as a patron of the arts. The single most famous artistic work produced in Russia during her reign was Etienne Maurice Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter the Great. Since its unveiling in 1782, this unique masterpiece, commissioned by Catherine in a deliberate effort to assert her claim to the legacy of the greatest of Russian tsars, has stood for two and a quarter centuries on the bank of the Neva River in the middle of the city Peter founded.
Empress Elizabeth, Peter’s daughter, idolized her father, but she had never erected what Catherine considered an appropriate monument to him. Now Catherine, not born a Russian but hoping to be accepted as the great tsar’s true political heir, decided that there should be a supreme visual tribute to the figure who had made Russia a great European power. She considered herself, a daughter of Europe coming to Russia eighteen years after Peter’s death, as resuming his journey to civilization and greatness. She wanted Russians to understand and accept this connection between them.
Because she believed that no one in Russia had sufficient talent to do the work she wanted done, she instructed her ambassador in Paris, then Prince Dmitry Golitsyn, to find a French sculptor to design and cast a heroic equestrian statue in bronze. The price originally offered was 300,000 livres. Golitsyn approached three well- known French sculptors; they asked 450,000, 400,000, and 600,000 livres. Golitsyn then spoke to his friend Diderot, and Diderot spoke to the sculptor Etienne Maurice Falconet, director of the sculpture workshop of the Royal Sevres porcelain factory. Falconet seemed an unlikely candidate. The son of a poor carpenter, he was considered competent but not brilliantly talented. Although Catherine had told Golitysn and Diderot that her monument was to be on a grand scale, Falconet was known for his small figures in porcelain, greatly admired by Louis XV’s mistress Madame de Pompadour. At fifty-one, he had never worked on a large scale. Nevertheless, he succumbed to Diderot’s persuasion, accepted the empress’s offer, and agreed to work for 25,000 livres per year, saying that he was ready to devote eight years to the work. In fact, he remained in Russia for twelve years.
Falconet arrived in St. Petersburg in 1766, and Catherine greeted him enthusiastically. It pleased her that Falconet had asked less in payment than the sum offered and far less than others had asked. Although in Paris Falconet had a reputation for a prickly ego, once he reached St. Petersburg and began working on the first clay models of the statue he seemed in constant need of his patron’s approval. Catherine obliged by showing him not only enthusiasm but deference. In 1767, when Falconet submitted his first design for the statue of Peter, she protested her lack of knowledge and excused herself from expressing an opinion. She recommended that the artist rely on his own judgment and the probable views of posterity. Falconet argued back, “My posterity is Your Majesty. The other may come when it will.”
“Not at all,” Catherine replied. “How can you submit yourself to my opinion. I do not even know how to draw. The merest schoolboy knows more about sculpture than I do.”
Pleased by the value the empress placed on his judgement, Falconet began to offer advice on the paintings that Diderot was buying and sending. His comments were often obsequious. “What a charming picture,” he wrote of a painting by a lesser-known artist. “What magnificent brushwork! What beautiful tones! What a sweet little head of Aphrodite! What an admirable consistency!” Concerning another painting, he said, “We should fall on our knees before it. Anyone who dares to think otherwise has neither faith nor morals. After all, I do know something about it; it is practically my profession.” To which Catherine replied, “I think you are right. I am well aware of the reason I cannot approve. It is because I don’t understand enough to see in it all that you do.” Often, after taking a private first look at her new paintings, Catherine wanted to share them with Falconet. “My paintings are beautiful,” she wrote about one arriving shipment. “When would you like to come and see them?”
Catherine may have assumed an ignorance of art, but in imagining her statue of Peter, she knew what she wanted. Falconet had never hoped to work on the scale that the empress was demanding, but her high expectations elevated his design and effort. In order to help him understand the appearance and movements of a rearing horse, the empress made available two of her favorite animals, along with their trainers, who could make them rear as the artist wished. Meanwhile, Falconet’s apprentice, eighteen-year-old Marie-Anne Collot, who had come with him from Paris, began working on the head and face of the tsar, using Peter’s death mask and the portraits available. She remained in Russia as long as Falconet and later married the sculptor’s artist son who came to visit.
By the summer of 1769, Falconet’s work on the statue was sufficiently advanced to allow the public to see the model. Not every reaction was favorable. One point of contention was the presence of the serpent the sculptor had placed beneath the horse’s rear hooves. Falconet was told that the creature was inappropriate and should be removed by people who did not realize that the support given by attachment to the serpent was essential. Without the three points made up by the hooves and tail resting on the serpent’s back, the horse would not stand. “They have not made, as I have, the calculation of forces which I need,” the sculptor declared of his critics. “They do not know that if their advice were followed, the work would not survive at all.” Catherine had no intention of getting involved in the controversy and replied to Falconet, “There is an old song which says ‘what will be, will be.’ That is my response to the serpent. Your reasons are good.”
By the spring of 1770, the model was complete, and there were more complaints. Falconet was said to have represented the Russian hero dressed as a Roman emperor, provoking leaders of the Orthodox Church to complain that this Frenchman had made Peter resemble a pagan monarch. Catherine calmed these critics by declaring that Peter was wearing an idealized representation of Russian costume. Later, Catherine wrote again to reassure her sensitive artist: “I hear only praise of the statue. I have heard from only one person a comment which was that she wished the clothing was more pleated, so that stupid people would not think it was a chemise, but you can’t please everybody.” Finally when the completed clay version was unveiled, Catherine still had to reassure the nervous Falconet, who now was worrying that there seemed to be no reaction to his work; people weren’t speaking to him, he complained. Again, Catherine tried to reassure him. “I know that … in general everyone is very happy,” she told him. “If people don’t say anything to you, it is out of delicacy. Some feel they aren’t qualified enough; others are perhaps afraid of displeasing you by telling you their opinion; still more can’t see a thing. Don’t take everything the wrong way.”
While the colossal statue was being molded, the sculptor and his patron were trying to find a base on which to
