Giacomo Quarenghi Elevation of a building with shops

Alessandro Martoni

The Fondazione Cini graphics collections contain a valuable corpus of finely watercolored architectural drawings by the Bergamasque architect Giacomo Quarenghi, who was the protagonist, in the Saint Petersburg of Catherine the Great, from 1780, and of Alexander I, of the monumental neo-Palladianism – filtered by the lessons of Lodoli and the Roman masters – that characterized the “Russian school” of triumphant neoclassicism. Of particular note is an elegant building, skillfully inserted in its urban surroundings, in one of the engraved plates (XXIV) of the second volume of the Mantuan edition (Negretti, 1844) of Fabbriche e disegni di Giacomo Quarenghi, architetto di S.M. l’Imperatore di Russia, illustrated by Quarenghi’s son Giulio in collaboration with the engraver Giacomo Bassaglia. The project, also documented by similar sheet at the Municipal Library of Bergamo (Album H, 40), is inserted amongst the buildings designed and built by Quarenghi on Vasilyevsky Island, beyond the Neva, for use as warehouses and shops commissioned pro publica utilitate by the “autocrats of the Russias,” in remembrance of the “glories of Rome.” 
The front elevation is divided into two formally distinct levels reflecting different functions, with a clear division between the ashlar portico on the ground floor, dedicated to shops, and the residential floors above, articulated by pairs of Corinthian giant columns that tie together the piano nobile and the mezzanine.
The scholar Vladimir Piljavskij compares the design to a similar one conserved at the State History Museum in Saint Petersburg, and to the municipal government building (Duma) erected on Gostinaya Street. However, it is closer in concept to the project for the Silver Rows on Nevskij Prospekt (Bergamo, Biblioteca Civica, Album H, 42), with its close references to the Roman palaces of Caprini and Vidoni Caffarelli recalling certain modules by Bramante and Raphael, and its use of ashlars and the Diocletian window making references to Palladian canons.

Bibliography: Giacomo Quarenghi, edited by S. Angelini, text
by V. Piljavskij, catalog by V. Zanella, (Bergamo: 1984), pp. 92-93; A. M. Pavelkina, Disegni di Giacomo Quarenghi. La raccolta del Museo statale della Storia di San Pietroburgo, Mendrisio 2003, pp. 56, cat. 52; R. Mangili, in Le carte riscoperte. I disegni delle collezioni Donghi, Fissore, Pozzi alla Fondazione Giorgio Cini, edited by G. Pavanello, (Venice: 2008), p. 111, cat. 201.