Pavlovsk Palace

thumb|The Pavlovsk Palace thumb|View of the Pavlovsk Palace park in 1808. Watercolour by Gabriel Ludwig Lory. Pavlovsk Palace (Russian: Павловский дворец) was constructed as an 18th-century Russian Imperial residence slightly over 30 km south of Saint Petersburg. The palace and its surrounding Pavlovsk Park are now a Russian state museum and public park. Quotes Built and named for the Emperor of Russia Emperor Paul I of Russia, Pavlovsk began as a convenient way of getting the then Grand Duke out of his mother's sight. Catherine the Great was anything but fond of her only legitimate son, and getting him out from underfoot was well worth the price of a palace, so, in 1777, she gave him a large estate 17 miles south of Saint Petersburg St. Petersburg and three miles from the royal resort of Tsarskoye Selo, and four years later building on the house was begun.As it turned out, however, the person who supervised every detail of the construction and the decoration was Paul's wife, the Grand Duchess, and later Empress, Maria Feodorovna (Sophie Dorothea of Württemberg Maria Fyodorovna. This civilized and artistically inclined German-Alsatian princess knew just what she was doing. The house was finished in 1796 and modified somewhat after a fire in 1803; as it stood at the time of her death in 1828, it was probably the finest (and certainly the most complete) Neoclassical architecture neo-classical palace in Europe. Olivier Bernier, https://www.nytimes.com/1990/11/04/books/no-palace-like-home.html No Palace Like Home (review of Pavlovsk: The Life of a Russian Palace by Suzanne Massie) The New York Times November 4, 1990 (See Suzanne Massie.) Built during the era of the Grand Tour European Grand Tour and the Archaeology of ancient Egypt first great archeological digs, the palace contains many motifs from antiquity, beginning with the Egyptian Vestibule (Yegipetskiy vestibyul) on the first floor, which is lined with pharaonic statues and zodiac medallions. From here, visitors are ushered upstairs to the second floor State Rooms via the main staircase, designed by Vincenzo Brenna Brenna with martial motifs to pander to Paul's pretensions. The northern parade of rooms reflect his martial obsessions, the southern ones the more domesticated tastes of Maria Fyodorovna. The striking thing about the rooms, though, is their relatively human scale — you could just about imagine living there — unlike those of the Great Palaces of Peterhof Palace Peterhof and Catherine Palace Tsarkoe Selo.At the top of the stairs, to the right, the domed Italian Hall (Italyanskiy zal) rises into the palace's central cupola. Its decor, intended by Charles Cameron (architect) Cameron to evoke a Ancient Roman bathing Roman bathhouse, is uniformly Neoclassical sculpture Neoclassical, with rich helpings of trompe l'oeil and Stucco#Sculptural and architectural use stuccos and candelabras shaped like French horns. Dan Richardson, The Rough Guide to St Petersburg Rough Guides UK 2008 9781848363267 https://books.google.com/books?id=u9GsBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA267 267 (448 pages) External links Russia - Pavlovsk - Palace Eric van Dyke, YouTube March 16, 2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DatLxaH6NHM Category:Buildings in St. Petersburg Category:Museums