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Among the Russian architects who received their initial training from these foreigners were Mikhail Zemtsov, Peter Eropkin and Ivan Korobov, who only began to take on major commissions in the late 1720s. Peter's painters were nearly all foreigners, too, as was the case at most European courts.[7] The most prolific court painters were Louis Caravaque (1684-1754) and Gottfried

Dannhauer (Tannhauer, 1680-1733/7). In addition to painting portraits and battle scenes (both produced versions of Peter at Poltava), their prime task was to record and celebrate the newly Westernised men and women of the court. Caravaque also introduced feminine-erotic elements into Russian art, as in his double portrait of Peter's daughters, Anna and Elizabeth (1717), which depicts the two girls as personifications of youth, beauty and fruitfulness. Such portraits often hung in rooms decorated with half-naked Dianas and Aphrodites. The allegorical female nude was a daring novelty in Russia, where classical conventions were still poorly understood and even 'seemly' portraits of women were a recent innovation.[8] Peter's taste was more for marine and battle scenes, but he also purchased the work of Old Masters.

Foreign artists taught their craft to Russian pupils, nearly all of whom started out as icon-painters. One such apprentice was Ivan Nikitin (c. I680 till after I742), whom Peter later sent to study in Italy. Nikitin's reputation was to some extent a Soviet invention. His biographers claimed that the Russian approached painting not as a 'pupil', but boldly and creatively, outstripping all the foreign artists working in Russia, whose works seemed 'inept and naive' in comparison.[9] A deathbed portrait of Peter I attributed to Nikitin was said to display a 'patriotic, purely Russian understanding of the image, a grief of loss which could be conveyed only by a Russian artist', whereas a canvas on the same theme by the German Dannhauer was dismissed as 'devoid of feeling'.[10] Nikitin's most recent biographer takes a more balanced approach.[11]Some paintings once attributed to Nikitin, who left only two signed canvases, are the subject of further investigation, for example the splendid portrait once erroneously entitled The Field Hetman. Russian art historians are now at liberty to acknowledge and research the foreign originals on which many Petrine images were based.[12] The work of foreign artists in Russia awaits thorough investigation, however.

The making of prints and engraving was supervised by foreign masters such as Adriaan Schoenebeck and Peter Picart, who superimposed Russian subjects on Western templates, for example siege and battle scenes from the Northern

War. To them and to the Russian engravers Ivan (1677-1743) and Aleksei Zubov (1682-1751) we owe a good part of our visual impression of the Petrine era.[13] A major subject was St Petersburg itself, as, for example, in Aleksei Zubov's city panorama (1716). Much-reproduced prints depict the dwarfs' wedding staged by Peter in 1710 and the wedding feast of Peter and his second wife Catherine in 1712.[14]

Unlike engraving, which was used in Muscovy for religious subjects, stone and metal sculpture in the round was completely new to most Russians, having long been stigmatised by the Orthodox Church as the art of graven images. Peter's chief sculptor was the Italian Carlo Bartolomeo Rastrelli (1675^-1744), whose bronze bust of Peter (1723-30), with its dynamic metal draperies, remains one of the key images of the tsar. Rastrelli failed to establish a school of Russian sculptors, however. Russian artists were more comfortable working with wooden relief carving, little of which has survived. The bulk of the statues for St Petersburg's gardens and residences had to be imported, mainly from Italy, where agents purchased both antique and contemporary pieces.[15]

Another Western novelty was instrumental music. Peter probably heard his first Western-style music in Moscow's Foreign Quarter and experienced opera and ballet on his first trip abroad. He preferred choral singing and drumming, both of which he practised vigorously, but he acknowledged the importance of courtly musical entertainments. In St Petersburg, guests at court functions were invariably entertained by musicians, who, like painters and foreign chefs, became an elite fashion accessory, especially after the Law on Assemblies of 1718 encouraged home entertainments. Foreign dance masters were in demand to teach Russians the latest steps.[16] The Dutch painter Cornelius de Bruyn thought the orchestra he heard in Menshikov's Moscow residence sounded 'just like in our countries: violins, basses, trumpets, oboes, flutes'.[17]

The use of musical instruments, including the organ, was still banned in church, but sacred music for the human voice was adapted for the new era. Parades celebrating military victories featured not only fanfares, but also choirs singing panegyric verses and cants. The seventeenth-century choral tradition was harnessed to the needs of the state and the rich expansiveness of the Russian unaccompanied choral music in church lived on into the new age, under the influence of both Russian native composers and foreigners, as did folksong. Menshikov, for example, kept a choir of Russian and Ukrainian singers alongside his foreign instrumentalists. All three strands were to continue into the great age of Russian music more than a century later, although Soviet musical historians were obliged to stress the importance of secular music and to underplay sacred works.[18]

It is unlikely that Peter had any memory of his father's court theatre, which closed in 1676. His own adult experience of the theatre probably began in the Dutch Republic in August 1697, where he saw a 'play about Cupid'.[19] Peter was probably indifferent to serious theatre, but he understood that theatre, like music, was an integral part of the Western cultural scene that he sought to emulate. In 1702 a troupe led by the German Johann-Christian Kunst duly arrived in Moscow to perform in a playhouse built in the Kremlin. The first plays were all in German, but Kunst and his successor Otto Fiirst took on Russian pupils and from 1705 plays in Russian (all translations) were staged. The repertoire consisted mainly of comic low-brow material from German and Dutch originals and bowdlerised versions of such plays as Moliere's Le Medecin malgre lui. Despite its impressive scenery and costumes, the theatre was poorly attended and soon ceased functioning altogether.[20] Peter's ill-fated public theatre was only part of the story. The Moscow Academy staged school dramas featuring characters personifying virtues and vices, while plays such as Russia's Glory celebrated current events. Plays were also staged at the Moscow Medical School.[21] In Rostov, Bishop Dmitrii established a theatre and staged his own plays, including The Nativity Play, with thrilling scenes of the slaughter of the innocents and Herod in hell.[22] Peter's sister Natalia and his sister-in-law

Tsaritsa Praskovia organised amateur dramatics, the Bible and lives of saints providing material for Play about the Holy Martyr Evdokia and Comedy of the Prophet Daniel.[23]