History of the site
Palaces, palaces, palaces...
The history of Oranienbaum stretches back beyond Catherine the Great’s arrival on the scene. The main palace dates from 1710, when the friend of Peter the Great, Alexander Menshikov, built himself an extravagant palace there, more so than any palace of Peter’s in fact. His behaviour eventually resulted in his banishment to Siberia in 1728 and in 1745 the estate was given to Grand Duke Peter (later Peter III), who built a small square palace for himself also by Rinaldi. Catherine in fact spent many unhappy years on the estate, before organising her coup d’état with Alexei and Grigory Orlov in June 1762. While Catherine marched to St. Petersburg, Peter lay hungover in bed at his little palace at Oranienbaum. Following her coup, she chose Rinaldi again to build a much more lavish palace for her on the same estate.
Away from it all
The charming seclusion Catherine envisaged is still evidence today, sited next to an ornamental lake and shrouded by the extensive park. The ground floor of the Chinese Palace comprises of 29 rooms, all of which are more dazzling than the next, as Rinaldi had assembled the finest European craftsmen to work alongside him. Twenty-eight rooms make up the ground floor, with nine grand receptions rooms set in an enfilade on the north side. A second level was added to the original one-story building by A. Stakenschneider. Larger than a pavilion, but on the small side for a Russian palace, the building is impressive, yet immediately welcoming.
Interior riches
The modestly named Entrance Hall sets the tone for the whole palace. Lavish scenes painted onto the plaster lend an intense vibrancy that is detailed yet restrained and elegant, complemented by furniture and pictures in keeping with the theme of each room.
The bright and airy Hall of Muses shows the graceful muses in full form, with identifying props, on a background light pinks and blues. Urania, the muse of astrology, is depicted with stars above her head, while Thalia, the muse of comedy, appears at the entrance to the Blue Lounge with a theatrical mask in her hand. Flowers and musical instruments are playfully depicted in the elaborate marquetry. Fifteen types of wood are used throughout the palace parquet to achieve an astonishing variation in colour without staining the wood. In this room, used after Catherine’s time for concerts, natural light streams in from outside as the French windows seem to melt into the gardens. Throughout the palace, the naturalistic rococo décor seems to bring the outside world inside.
Chinoiserie triumphs
Finally, one arrives in the two Chinese-style rooms that give the palace its name. The Small Chinese Cabinet shows birds adorning rich Chinese silk, while the parquet has Chinese latticework and bowls of flowers. But it is in the next room that Rinaldi gives free reign to his imagination to create an ornate extreme. In the Great Chinese Cabinet, the ceiling painting showing The Marriage of Europe and Asia is framed by a riot of Chinese patterns, fronds, and dragons. The walls are an intricate mosaic of 20 different types of wood showing vast imagined Chinese landscapes.
Chinese palace
The shimmering walls
One stumbles onto the major attraction of the Chinese Palace even before reaching the central Great Hall. The Glass-Beaded Salon (sometimes called the Bugle Study) is unique in Europe, featuring exotic scenes of birds, cornucopias, and flowers made up of over two million shimmering horizontal glass beads. The effect is breathtaking as the elegant birds glitter in and out of focus. Astonishingly, the room originally contained a glass floor that had to replaced by parquet. The designs are by the Barozzi brothers, and whose production by nine Russian embroiderers was overseen by Marie de Chele, using glass beads from the Lomonosov factory, where they worked from 1762-64. Her signature is on one of the panels, and she was a former actress with a French theatrical troupe at the Russian court.
Their fragility is apparent, as some of them are starting to unravel. They are fixed to the walls in their gold frames, shaped like palm trunks, so removing them for cleaning would break the threads and shatter these fantasy landscapes.
Catherine’s legitimacy
The Grand Hall is at the centre of the Chinese Palace and dazzles with the richness and variation of its scagliola (decorated or false marble) and unexpected size. In the centre was the Triumph of Mars by Giambattista Tiepolo, which disappeared after being removed from the ceiling for safekeeping during the Second World War. Busts of Elizabeth Petrovna and her father, Peter the Great, face one another other above each of the doors.
Further symbolism is provided by the painting Diana and Endymion, which tells the story of a lowly youth whom a goddess loved. In these two elements Catherine identifies herself with the legitimate imperial dynasty, and hints at her elevation of Orlov from his humble origins.