churches erected by merchants, monasteries, and parishioners. The Church of the
Elevation of the Cross (1764–7; Figure 13.9) erected in Irkutsk by a Colonel Leslie
and the merchant F. Nashivankin, for example, shows the characteristic
seventeenth-century “ship”silhouette of bell tower, nave, and domed church,
with exuberantly decorative pilasters and window surrounds. In 1787 Catherine II
attended services in Smolensk’s Dormition Cathedral, restored on the site of a
collapsed twelfth-century predecessor. Completed in 1772 after a century of effort,
it perpetuated the imperial style of Empress Elizabeth—decorative baroque with
elegant windows, striking green-blue walls, complex details, and ornate iconostasis
carved andfilled with icons by Ukrainian craftsmen. Smolensk’s religious architec-
ture demonstrated Russian imperial imprint, but at a lag.
Since Russia acquired Livland and Estland in 1710, in principle it might have
transformed the urban landscape with Russian-style architecture over the century.
But its visual mark was muted. Reval and Riga were thriving metropolises with
strong German merchant and suburban noble communities whose tastes dictated
architectural styles. The fortresses, cathedrals, and homes of these trading centers
dated back to the medieval Livonian Order and demonstrated styles ranging from
Gothic to Renaissance to restrained north European baroque, housing the confes-
sional diversity of post-Reformation Europe: Lutheran, Reformed, and Polish
Catholic cathedrals and parish churches, Uniate and Russian Orthodox cathedrals,
Jewish synagogues. Reval was home to the soaring and graceful cathedrals of the
Dome, the Holy Spirit, St. Nicholas, and St. Olai, all medieval edifices remodeled
in late Gothic in thefifteenth century; its Town Hall from the late fourteenth/early
fifteenth century is a model of central European Renaissance civic architecture; its
many surviving Renaissance guilds and home structures of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries testify to the city’s bourgeois wealth. Like Reval, Riga was a
charming medieval city with magnificent medieval Gothic cathedrals and multiple
modest churches, some enduring as Catholic churches (the Dome, St Peter’s,
St. John’s, St. Jacob’s), some converted to Lutheran in the sixteenth century. As
in Reval, Riga’s secular architecture showcased the prosperity of its guilds and urban
magistrates.
Russia did not make an architectural statement in Livland and Estland until late in
the eighteenth century, restrained in part by the prohibition (1714–41) of stone
building when St. Petersburg was being constructed and by a laissez-faire policy
towards the Baltics. Russian presence was more evident in Riga and its environs in the
eighteenth century than in Reval, but in neither area was the essentially German look
of the cities and countryside displaced. Russian-sponsored buildings adopted the
restrained baroque and early classicism of the era and were matched by active building
by local urban and provincial German elites. Peter I, for example, commissioned a
charming summer palace outside of Reval for his wife in 1718 (Figure 13.10), with a
restrained baroque exterior and exuberant Italianate interior, designed by Italian
architect Nicolo Michetti. In similar early Petersburg baroque, in the 1730s
St. Peterburg’s court architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli designed two residences for
Empress Anna’s minister Biron in Courland, not then formally part of the Russian
empire, but in its circle of influence. In Riga, an early stage of Russian building
288 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801