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Among the many foreign artists who responded
to Peter the Great's invitation to build and decorate his new capital was the
Italian sculptor Carlo Bartolomeo Rastrelii, 1675-1744. He arrived in 1715 and
his intention was to stay in Russia only a few years, but he remained there
until the end of his life. At one time he taught sculpture at the Academy that
Peter founded in 1725 and which offered the following year a course in
"Artistic sculpture." Even more important were his busts and
monuments, which inaugurated a new era of Russian sculpture. The first was the
baroque bronze of Peter, sculpted in 1723 and showing the first Russian emperor
in all his determination and might. Rastrelli used rich costumes, and many
decorations, in addition to regal postures and distinctive expressions of the
face to accentuate the character of the person he sculpted. Less successful are
the two empresses, Anna and Elizabeth, while the equestrian monument of Peter
the Great, made after the death of the emperor, lost he original expression of
enthusiasm and impulse of life and shows the ruler with a crown of laurel,
solid and heavy, ready to crush anybody who opposes his might. In addition to
his sculptures, Rastrelli was often commissioned to decorate the interiors of
newly built palaces, some of them designed by his son, who happened to be the
best architect Russia ever had.
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