Elisabethan Baroque

Elizabethan Baroque

Church of the Peterhof Palace; west façade of the Winter Palace; the Smolny Cathedral
Years active	18th century
Country	Russian Empire

Elizabethan Baroque (Russian: Елизаветинское барокко) is a term for the Russian baroque architectural style, developed during the reign of Elizabeth of Russia, between 1741 and 1762. It is also called ‘style rocaille’ or ‘rococo style’. The Italian architect Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli is the key figure of this trend, which is still given the name ‘Rastrellian Baroque’. The Russian architect Savva Chevakinsky is also a renowned figure representing this style.

Unlike the former Russian baroque styles such as Petrine Baroque, the Elizabethan Baroque tended to appreciate the Muscovite Baroque, and maintained the very essence of Russian architectural elements like the five cupolas shaped like onions.

The Elizabethan Baroque tended to create the architecture of grandeur in order to glorify the might of the Russian Empire. Rastrelli designed majestic palace complexes in Saint Petersburg and its environs: the Winter Palace, the Catherine Palace and the Peterhof Palace. These palaces are characterized by gigantic proportions, golden splendour decorations, the use of two or three shades of colour for their façades, the refinement added by their gilding, give these buildings a particular style. The festive character of Rastrelli’s work left its mark on all the Russian architecture of the middle of the eighteenth century. His most spectacular work is the Smolny Convent in St. Petersburg, the model he had made demonstrates the ambition of the original project that was not completed: the immense pyramidal steeple was never built.

Rastrelli was influenced by the French architects Germain Boffrand and Robert de Cotte; the great architects of Central Europe, from Balthasar Neumann (Würzburg) to François de Cuvilliés (Munich), from Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann (Dresden) to Fischer von Erlach (Vienna, Salzburg); the monasteries in Moscow; not to mention the reminiscences of Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Italian Baroque. He adapted the Italian Baroque taste to the immensity of the landscape of St. Petersburg, his art is made of an amalgam of all these styles, which he has managed to transcend into an original synthesis, more Russian than European.