St. Petersburg through Venetian Eyes: An Episode in Late Eighteenth-Century Book Illustration

Abstract

This article analyzes a print that was published in Venice in 1797 as the opening image to a biography of Catherine II. Certainly prepared during the empress’s life, the publication appeared just months after her death in a watershed year for Europe which saw the fall of the Republic of Venice. The print imagines the moment that Peter the Great founded the new city of St. Petersburg over ninety years earlier. Through an exploration of the carefully constructed messages in the print, this paper examines the legacy of the image of Peter in Western Europe against which Catherine was understood. It considers the imagery of St. Petersburg in relation to Venice: the capitals of two empires, one in its ascendency and one at the point of collapse.