architecturally with construction by wealthy monasteries, burgers, Cossack elites,
demonstrating various shades of baroque across the century. In Pechersk the
Trinity-over-the-Gate Church in the Caves Monastery (1722–9) displayed an
effusive baroque, while by mid-century the monastery was adopting a more
orderly but still magnificent baroque for bell towers and churches at its various
campuses. Empress Elizabeth’s court architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli constructed a
tsarist palace in restrained baroque here in 1755. In Podil a Town Hall featured
rococo style in the 1690s, while Rastrelli brought there a decorative Petersburg
baroque with the St. Andrew church, orderly but energetic in its bright blue color,
defining pilasters and sinuous gilded detail (Figure 13.11). Similarly ornate
pilasters and decoration characterized the remodeled bell tower (1788) of the
Sophia Cathedral in the Old Town. Outside of town, Kyrylo Rozumovsky, a
quintessential imperial noble, commissioned the St. Petersburg Palladian archi-
tect, Charles Cameron, for a neoclassical mansion in Baturin in 1799. There was
much interaction between Kyiv and Russia in this realm, with the St. Petersburg
architect Johann Gottfried Schädel designing buildings here and Ukrainian
craftsmenfilling churches in St. Petersburg, Smolensk, and Moscow withflorid
icons and ornate carved iconostases for which they were celebrated. Such cultural
interchange meant that Russia hardly overwhelmed the city skyline with an
imperial statement of power.
When Catherine II annexed Crimea in 1783, however, literate and artistic
Russia took it as a canvas on which to paint Russia’s vision of empire. For Catherine
and her ideologues—governor-general of the south Grigorii Potemkin, odists, and
poets—Crimea represented all things: a garden paradise of abundant orchards and
vineyards redolent of Eden, an exotic Oriental playground of beauty and leisure, a
demonstration of Russia’s multi-ethnic richness, a link to“civilization”through the
antique grandeur of Greek and Roman ruins (evidenced by Russia’s naming and
renaming Crimean landmarks with Greek names), and an untamed wilderness of
mountain vistas and uncivilized Muslim Tatars. All these currents were played out
in political discourse and in the visual.
As Andreas Schönle suggests, some indication of Catherine’s complex vision of
Crimea can be derived from her celebrated visit to New Russia and Crimea in 1787.
Her goals were both political and cultural. Founding new harbors, cities, and a
capital, she celebrated her imperial possession of this strategically important terri-
tory and her defeat of the Ottoman empire. She also aimed to impress the European
public as well, at a time when she was engaging in brisk disputes with French
intellectuals about whether Russia was uncivilized and despotic. (In 1770 she had
published in French a refutation of the scientist and Siberian traveler Jean Baptiste
Chappe d’Auteroche’s scathing critique of Russia.) For the European dignitaries
who accompanied her (the incognito Joseph II of Austria, the French envoy Count
Louis Philippe de Ségur, and others), she and Potemkin staged spectacles that
demonstrated Russia’s ancient ties with Greek civilization through Byzantium
(rebuffing French assertions of its superior“civilization”) and paraded before
them troops and tableaux representing all her subject peoples—Cossacks, Tatars,
Kalmyks, Bashkirs—as harmonious and civilized.
290 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801