Бартоломео Растрелли — architect с корнями из Russian Empire
Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli was born in Paris in 1700, the son of the Florentine sculptor Bartolomeo Carlo Rastrelli. When Peter I recruited his father to the new capital on the Neva, the boy came too, arriving in Saint Petersburg around 1716. He spent his first years in Russia working alongside his father on aristocratic interiors, returned to Paris in the mid-1720s to finish his training, and came back for good in 1730.
That year Empress Anna appointed him senior court architect, and he held the position for more than three decades across three reigns. His style — sometimes called Elizabethan Baroque — married Italian and Rococo motifs to Russian tradition: polychrome facades, white columns against coloured grounds, gilded stucco, and a scale that had no European precedent outside the very largest royal projects.
His reputation rests on two buildings. The Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo and the fourth Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, begun in 1754, are arguably unmatched in Europe for decorative opulence. The Winter Palace occupied more than four thousand workers, ran to some 460 rooms around a quadrangle, and carried 176 sculpted figures along its roofline. He also built the Smolny Convent, the Vorontsov and Stroganov palaces in Saint Petersburg, and St Andrew's Church and the Mariyinsky Palace in Kyiv.
His career ended almost exactly when the Winter Palace was finished. Elizabeth died in 1762; Catherine II, who preferred Neoclassicism and regarded the Baroque as overdone, removed him from the project within months. He was granted extended leave, a generous pension and, in effect, a polite dismissal. He went to Courland to complete the ducal palaces at Rundāle and Jelgava for his old patron Biron, and spent his last years in modest dealings with Italian art dealers, largely out of public life. The Imperial Academy of Arts elected him an honorary member shortly before his death.
He died in Saint Petersburg on 29 April 1771. His exterior design for the Winter Palace survives almost unaltered, and remains the single most recognisable building in Russia.
"Paris to Russia as a child, with his sculptor father"
История миграцииПрослеживая корни — Saint Petersburg (Russia)
The Winter Palace, the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo and the Smolny Convent are all his.
Born in Paris to an Italian sculptor who took Russian service, he grew up in Russia and became the defining architect of the Elizabethan Baroque.
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Saint Petersburg (Russia). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.