Latest / The Romanov Dynasty: Rise, Power, and Bloody End — Fexingo History / The Romanovs and Catherine the Great's Art Collection
Transcript
- Lucas: If you've been stepping into history with us episode by episode, you know we've talked about Romanov power — their wars, their police, their revolutions. But there's a softer side to their legacy that's equally fascinating: their role as collectors of culture. Luna: You mean the art? The Hermitage? Lucas: Exactly. And when we say Hermitage, we really mean Catherine the Great. Before her, the Winter Palace had some paintings, but nothing like what she built. Catherine was a voracious collector — and she had a very specific strategy. Luna: What drove her? Was it personal taste, or political? Lucas: Both. Catherine came to power as a German-born usurper — she overthrew her own husband, Peter III. She needed legitimacy, and one way to get it was to present Russia as a civilized European power, not some backward eastern empire. So she set out to acquire the finest art in Europe — often by buying entire collections at once. Lucas: Her first major coup came in 1764, when she purchased 225 paintings from the Berlin merchant Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky. That became the nucleus of the Hermitage. Gotzkowsky had originally assembled the collection for Frederick the Great of Prussia, but Frederick ran out of money after the Seven Years' War. Catherine swooped in. Luna: So she basically bought the collection meant for her biggest rival. That's a power move. Lucas: Absolutely. And she didn't stop there. She appointed a brilliant agent, Dmitry Golitsyn, as her ambassador to Paris and The Hague. Golitsyn was her eyes and ears at art auctions across Europe. He cultivated relationships with dealers and artists — and he was the one who negotiated the purchase of Voltaire's entire library after Voltaire died in 1778. Luna: She bought someone's whole library? Lucas: Not just any library — Voltaire's. And she didn't just buy the books; she bought the rights to publish them. She even corresponded with Voltaire for years, flattering him, calling him 'the most illustrious man of the age.' It was pure public relations: the enlightened despot befriending the champion of reason. Lucas: Then there was Diderot. Catherine heard that Diderot was in financial trouble — he needed a dowry for his daughter. So she bought his entire library for 15,000 livres, a huge sum, and then hired him as the librarian — at a salary of 1,000 livres a year — and let him keep the books in Paris until he died. It was a masterstroke. Luna: She basically paid him to be her intellectual ambassador. Lucas: Exactly. Diderot traveled to St. Petersburg in 1773 and spent five months at Catherine's court. They had daily conversations about philosophy, politics, art. He called her 'the soul of a Caesar with all the charms of a Cleopatra.' But there was a darker side — Catherine was also censoring his more radical ideas. Luna: So it was a kind of controlled enlightenment. Lucas: Precisely. She wanted the prestige of enlightenment thinkers without the revolutionary consequences. And her art collection was the same: it was about projecting power. She commissioned a massive expansion of the Winter Palace — the Small Hermitage, the Old Hermitage — specifically to house her growing collection. By the end of her reign, she owned over 4,000 paintings. Luna: That's staggering. How did she choose what to buy? Lucas: She relied heavily on Golitsyn and other agents, but she also had definite tastes. She loved Dutch and Flemish painting — Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Rubens. She bought the entire collection of the French financier Pierre Crozat, which included masterpieces like Rembrandt's 'The Return of the Prodigal Son.' She also acquired the collection of the British prime minister Sir Robert Walpole — the Houghton Hall collection. Luna: That caused a scandal, didn't it? Lucas: Huge scandal. When word got out that Catherine was buying Walpole's paintings, there was a public outcry in Britain. Horace Walpole, Robert's son, fought to keep them in England, but Parliament refused to fund the purchase. So the entire collection — 204 paintings, including works by Van Dyck, Poussin, and Veronese — was shipped to St. Petersburg in 1779. Luna: It must have been incredible to see those crates arriving at the Winter Palace. Lucas: And it wasn't just paintings. Catherine collected cameos, coins, medals, gems, tapestries, sculptures. She had a passion for engraved gems — she bought the collection of the Duke of Orleans, which had over a thousand pieces. She even had a special room, the Loggia of Raphael, built to display copies of Raphael's Vatican frescoes. Lucas: But here's the thing — her collection wasn't just for her. She opened parts of the Hermitage to the public, though only to the nobility and well-dressed citizens. You had to arrive in formal attire. It was a way to showcase Russia's grandeur to its own elites and to foreign visitors. Luna: So she was using art to build a national identity. Lucas: Exactly. And that tradition continued after her death. The Hermitage grew under later Romanovs — Nicholas I built the New Hermitage specifically as a public museum, which opened in 1852. But Catherine set the template: art as a tool of imperial prestige. Luna: And today the Hermitage is one of the greatest museums in the world. Lucas: It is. And it's a direct legacy of Catherine's ambition. If today was actually useful to you, the way these stay ad-free is listener support — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It really does help keep these conversations going. Luna: Yeah, it's a small way to say thanks for the deep dives. Lucas: And speaking of deep dives — we haven't even touched on the fire of 1837, which destroyed much of the Winter Palace but miraculously spared the Hermitage art collection. That's a whole story in itself. Luna: How did they save it? Lucas: Quick thinking by the palace staff. They formed a human chain to pass the paintings out of the burning building into the snow. Nicholas I himself helped direct the effort. In the end, not a single painting was lost. The fire consumed the interiors, but the art survived — a testament to how much those treasures mattered. Luna: And the irony is that Catherine's collection, which she built for prestige, ended up outlasting the dynasty itself. Lucas: Exactly. The Romanovs are gone, but the Hermitage remains. And every time you walk through those galleries, you're walking through Catherine's vision of what Russia should be — a cultural superpower, equal to any in Europe.