St Petersburg in the Era of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna: Paintings and Engravings from the Collection of the Russian Museum

Today, the appearance of Elizabethan St Petersburg is known to the general public primarily through the work of the outstanding mid-18th century artist Mikhail Makhayev (1717–1770). Commissioned by the Imperial Academy of Sciences between 1748 and 1750, he created a series of masterful drawings depicting views of St Petersburg. Using the original drawings, leading engravers of the Academy’s Engraving Chamber – the principal printing workshop of the Russian Empire – created twelve views of the capital along with a grand map. Their works were then compiled into a splendid album, Plan of the Capital City of St Petersburg with an Image of the Most Illustrious Avenues, Published by the Efforts of the Imperial Academy of Sciences and Arts in St Petersburg in 1753. This was, in essence, a state-sponsored project aimed at presenting St Petersburg as a model European city, the equal of the world’s magnificent capitals. The images of completed buildings were shown alongside schematic representations of structures still under construction or in the planning stages. Many of those masterpieces of Petrine and Elizabethan Baroque architecture have survived to this day. On the city map and in the panoramic engravings, the image of a perfect urban space is presented in tangible and complete form devoid of empty lots or fire-damaged areas, where even newly laid foundations are miraculously transformed into finished buildings. The illusionistic nature of the imagery was intended to convince the public of the real existence of its prototype. This persuasive effect was met with admiration not so much for the artists’ skills, as for the vision and wisdom of the crowned originator of the idea, and for the grandeur of the empire that possessed such a fabulous capital.

The engravings with St Petersburg views based on Mikhail Makhayev’s drawings were created by the leading masters of the Elizabethan era, including Grigory Kachalov, Efim Vinogradov, Alexei Grekov, Yakov Vasilyev, Ekim Vnukov and Ivan Elyakov. Their engravings were widely distributed across Russia both as individual works and part of albums. Copies of the album featuring St Petersburg views were also sent “overseas to the gentlemen ambassadors... residing at foreign courts... and to the royal libraries” in cities such as Warsaw, Berlin, Paris, London, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Vienna, and Dresden. Until the final quarter of the 18th century, these engravings remained almost the only source for both Russian and foreign artists, who depicted splendid landscapes of St Petersburg in their paintings and graphic works as they had been created by Mikhail Makhayev. These invaluable works, carefully preserved in the museum’s collection and rarely accessible to the public, are being showcased at the exhibition St Petersburg in the Era of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna. Among the exhibits, visitors can see several copies of the 1753 album of panoramic engravings, as well as painted copies based on the engraved originals.