One of the most notable steps in the change of Russia’s political and cultural image was the establishment in 1703 of the city of St. Petersburg in the mouth of the Neva River; it became the official new capital in 1712. The tsar was particularly proud of that action, fantastic in both its boldness and irrationality, and he never failed to include it in lists of his main achievements. In terms of culture, St. Petersburg became a laboratory for elaborating the architectural and behavioral models that Peter wanted to extend throughout the country.
Private brick buildings, European-style parks, and streets paved with stones and illuminated by streetlamps first appeared in Russia in St. Petersburg. Peter’s favorite creation was the Summer Garden, which abutted his summer residence; he had personally drawn the original plans for it. An inveterate teacher, the tsar told his gardener, “I want people who stroll here in the garden to find something edifying.”30
Rejecting the gardener’s suggestion to place books on the benches, Peter ordered sculptural groups depicting the characters of Aesop’s fables, which he loved, for the park. The groups ornamented the fountains. A metal sign at each fountain gave the fable’s text in large letters. Peter liked to gather strollers and explain the meanings of the depicted stories.
Another educational measure was the installation of a Roman marble statue of Venus, bought on Peter’s orders in Italy in 1719. This was a direct challenge to the Orthodox Church, which banned sculptural depictions of people in general (it was considered pagan idolatry), and of naked women in particular.
In Russia, the marble Venus was immediately dubbed the “white she-devil,” and of course would have been vandalized if Peter had not prudently posted guards. Bringing stunned (and probably secretly indignant) guests over to his beloved Venus, Peter tried to teach them the basics of mythology, which he knew rather well.
Still, Peter’s erudition was basically utilitarian. The great German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz, at one time Peter’s adviser, recalled the tsar’s statement that he found more beauty in well-working machinery than in lovely paintings. According to Alexandre Benois, Peter made a great mistake: wanting to reform Russian art, he took as his model provincial Dutch culture, bringing in second-rate masters and thereby slowing Russia’s artistic progress.
Benois did not understand that Peter was not interested in importing the most fashionable or sophisticated European art; he wanted what he considered most useful and necessary for Russia’s current needs.
What Peter needed most of all were craftsmen who could build and design St. Petersburg; he insisted that the European architects, sculptors, and artists he hired be jacks-of-all-trades. By that time in Europe, the leading artists were primarily narrow specialists: some did portraits, others still lifes, and still others historical paintings.
Peter expected that the artists he brought to Russia would be able to paint formal portraits of the tsar and high officials; capture such amusing curiosities as bearded ladies or two-headed children; restore old paintings; paint palace walls; and depict the parades and festivities marking Peter’s victories. In addition, the visiting artists were supposed to train Russian apprentices.
Naturally, well-known and self-respecting artists had no intention of signing such contracts, and mostly craftsmen and hack artists came to Russia. Their students were a rather sorry lot, too: “Peter felt that anything could be learned given willingness and diligence—and therefore the selection for artists was made the way it was for seamen or artillery-men—by force.”31
And this despite the fact that Russia had its own majestic centuries-old painterly tradition. I am speaking of course about icons (without going into their purely religious significance), those astonishing, magical, and spiritually elevating artifacts of medieval Russian culture. But Peter, even though, like all Russian tsars, he grew up contemplating icons, obviously did not perceive icon painting as useful. It was a reflection of his ambivalent attitude toward the church.
While a believer, Peter nevertheless was deeply suspicious of the church hierarchy. Remembering the conflicts between his father and Patriarch Nikon, Peter eventually did away with the patriarchy, informing the gathered church officials that from that moment on they would be ruled by the Government Synod, appointed by the tsar; that is, Peter placed himself as the de facto head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Among its other goals, this move was an attempt to put Russian culture under the autocrat’s direct control and away from the influence of the church—an attempt that succeeded in many respects.
Under Peter, icon painting was downgraded to a level commensurate with carpentry, weaving, and sewing. Since icon painting methods could not be used to illustrate scientific books or execute blueprints and drafts, engravers and their work, which was useful for information and propaganda, came to the fore.
A typical figure in that sense was the engraver Alexei Zubov, a leading master of the Petrine period. His father had been an icon painter in the court of the first Romanov, Tsar Mikhail, and served Peter’s father as well. Zubov was sent to study with a visiting Dutch engraver who instructed the Russian youth, “Everything that I see or think about can be cut into copper.”32
For a hereditary icon master, such ideas must have been heretical—icon painting was not about reproducing life but about executing the traditional painterly formulas that had been perfected over generations. But Zubov quite quickly turned into an able professional engraver. He moved from Moscow to St. Petersburg and became the first inspired portrayer of the new capital; his majestic 1720 composition, The Triumphal Entrance into St. Petersburg of Captured Swedish Frigates, preserved for us the vital force and visual charm of the young city.
Peter liked Zubov’s work, and he was given important commissions, such as his famous Depiction of the Marriage of His Royal Majesty Peter I and Ekaterina Alexeyevna in 1712, where more than one hundred feasting ladies and cavaliers hail the newlyweds, and the face of the future Catherine I is significantly larger than the faces of the ladies around her (a vestige of the icon painting tradition).
Peter was famously tightfisted, but a good professional could count on a tolerable salary. A timely reminder of one’s accomplishments could help. Zubov received 195 rubles a year, a good sum, three times more than some of his Russian colleagues but half what foreigners got (a humiliating practice that later Romanovs retained). In 1719, Zubov complained to the tsar that in view of the city’s “high cost of all foodstuffs there is nothing to feed my family and pay my debts.”33
We do not know if the tsar raised his salary then, but it is clear from his petition to Peter in 1723 that Zubov did not live in such constrained circumstances as he tried to portray earlier. Zubov addresses the monarch as “His Most Serene Emperor and Autocrat of All Russia Peter the Great, Father of the Fatherland and Most Merciful Sovereign.” (Emperor and Father of the Fatherland were new titles given to Peter two years earlier by the Government Senate; he was named “the Great” then, too.) After the formalities, Zubov moved on to the point: when the artist was traveling in his own carriage on business to the home of Prince Dimitri Kantemir, he was attacked by two robbers, who tried to steal his horse and beat his servant, “and when they started beating me and my man, I screamed. Hearing my screams, they, the robbers, ran off.”34
This passage is interesting not only because it reveals that an artist had his own carriage and servant, and not only because it is a vivid description of a typical attack by robbers for that time, but also because it mentions the man Zubov was going to see—Dimitri Kantemir.