Reliefs of the Summer Palace: An Early Onset of Russian Antiquity

The Summer Palace, a ship-like realisation of Peter the Great’s high aspirations in fields both mundane and aesthetic, wears an admirably preserved and well-maintained girdle of twenty-eight bas-reliefs and one haute-relief crowning the entrance. Themed mostly around Ovid’s Metamorphoses, they are both propagandistic allegories and reflections on the private life of the incumbent. The accumulation of traditional motives is handled with a freedom betraying a lack of thoroughness in representation as well as a desire for all things classical. The reliefs thus appear to be neither an unfinished piece by the great Andreas Schlüter nor an accurate reproduction of well-known artefacts crafted by his continuers (Braunstein, Mattarnowi, or even Le Blond, et al.) and marred beyond recognition by clumsy handiwork on the home turf, but an early attempt of domestic art to think Classics while going under its own steam in their execution. The living force behind these pieces was, evidently, Peter the Great himself: the in­ventiveness of composition uninhibited by poor execution, the introduction of recurrent sea­faring (sea is an omnipresent background in reliefs even when the plot borrowed from Ovid is definitely terrestrial) and amatory motifs along with a close unity of literary and allegoric, intimately personal and statesmanlike, point in his direction. The engravings by Giovanni Andrea Maglioli on which (as Renate Kroll has shown) five relieves are modelled also correlate with Ovid representing the amorous Neptune transformed in various sea beasts. However, the majority of plots and artistic decisions prove to be sourced in a set of 226 engravings by Charles Le Brun originally accompanying a free verse translation of the Metamorphoses by Isaac de Berserade. The later copy of this work spotted by Peter either in Holland during the Great Embassy (1697–1698) or among the books of his European friends at home and finally reproduced in Petersburg in 1722 delivered the first and, admirably, never quite so full plastic representation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Russia.