Elizabethan Baroque

• 1. Introduction

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  Elizabethan Baroque is the name given to a Russian architectural style that took hold between 1741 and 1762, during the reign of Elizabeth of Russia. Its clearest monument today is a building that was never finished. The surviving model for the Smolny Convent in St. Petersburg shows an immense pyramidal steeple that its architect never got to build. That architect was the Italian Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli, whose name is so tied to the style that it is also called Rastrellian Baroque. Why would a style built for grandeur leave its grandest steeple unbuilt? And why do historians insist this look isn't really Rococo, when so many people call it exactly that?

• 2. Palaces Of Grandeur

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  Three palace complexes carry Rastrelli's ambitions into stone: the Winter Palace, the Catherine Palace, and the Peterhof Palace, all built in or around St. Petersburg. Each was designed at a gigantic scale, covered in golden ornament, with facades painted in two or three contrasting shades of colour. Gilding gave the buildings a further refinement, setting a particular tone. This festive quality running through Rastrelli's work shaped Russian architecture across the middle of the eighteenth century. At court, he was far from alone. A host of other architects, among them Savva Chevakinsky and Andrey Kvasov, competed for the empress's commissions in St. Petersburg.

• 3. An Original Synthesis

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  Rastrelli's approach pulled from across Europe: the French architects Germain Boffrand and Robert de Cotte shaped his early ideas. He also drew on the great architects of Central Europe. These included Balthasar Neumann in Würzburg, François de Cuvilliés in Munich, and Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann in Dresden. Fischer von Erlach, active in both Vienna and Salzburg, was another influence. The monasteries of Moscow left their own imprint, alongside echoes of Gian Lorenzo Bernini and the Italian Baroque tradition. Rastrelli took this Italian Baroque taste and stretched it to match the vast landscape of St. Petersburg. His work fused all of these sources into something new. Only in a handful of his interiors does that fusion start to resemble the ornate style most people call Rococo.

• 4. Not Quite Rococo

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  Unlike the Petrine Baroque that came before it, Elizabethan Baroque looked backward to an older Russian tradition. It embraced the Muscovite Baroque and preserved the country's own architectural signatures, including the five cupolas shaped like onions. That same instinct toward grandeur, aimed at glorifying the might of the Russian Empire, drove Rastrelli's biggest commissions. Yet not everything about the style fits the Rococo label people gave it. The fronts of the Winter Palace, for instance, carry exuberant coloured stuccos marked by mighty colonnades and delicate window openings. That combination has the solidity of mature Baroque, not the curving lightness typical of Rococo. The same tension between grandeur and restraint would soon surface far from the palace grounds of St. Petersburg, among architects working around Moscow.

• 5. Rivals And Regional Reach

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  Around Moscow, Dmitry Ukhtomsky and Ivan Fyodorovich Michurin carried the Elizabethan Baroque into their own commissions during the mid-eighteenth century. In St. Petersburg, one specialist stood apart: the Swiss architect Pietro Antonio Trezzini, who focused on religious buildings. The style barely traveled to Ukraine at all. A short list of exceptions stands out there: some constructions by Andrey Kvasov, Antonio Rinaldi, and Johann Gottfried Schädel. Rastrelli himself added one more, his Saint Andrew's Church in Kyiv. One of those names, Antonio Rinaldi, was about to take on a far bigger role once the empress's reign came to a close.

• 6. The Turn To Classicism

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  When Empress Elizabeth Petrovna died, control over the court's building projects passed to Antonio Rinaldi. Rinaldi had already made his name at a smaller scale, working on the courtyard of the Oranienbaum Palace. He had no interest in matching Rastrelli's grandiose achievements, and instead brought the Rococo style into the court's architecture. By the years after 1760, Rinaldi and other prominent architects had turned away from Baroque altogether, choosing the aesthetics of Classicism instead. In Russian, the style is still known by its original name, Елизаветинское барокко, or Elizavetinskoe barokko.