Pietro Antonio Novelli Tsar Peter the Great founding the city of Petersburg in 1703, Catherine II acclaimed empress of Russia

Alessandro Martoni

Etching and burin; 379 × 422 mm (inv. 36257), gift of Alessandro Bettagno

Both engravings come from a rare copy of the six-volume edition of the work by the Tuscan polygraph Francesco Becattini dedicated to the Vita e Fasti di Caterina II, Imperatrice ed autocratrice di tutte le Russie, published between 1797 and 1798 by Agnelli in Lugano in collaboration, for the illustrations, with the Venetian bookseller and publisher Antonio Zatta, famous for his vast production of maps. Among the folded plates not bound with the text, in addition to the maps showing the territories and conquests of the Russian empire, are two scenes engraved on copper by the Venetian engraver Giuliano Zuliani to a design by Pietro Antonio Novelli, an erudite painter poised between Rococò, Bolognese Baroque and Roman Neoclassicism and a leading book illustrator in Venice in the second half of the eighteenth century. Zatta applied Novelli’s brilliant and prolific drawing talents to the chalcography apparatuses of demanding publishing undertakings, such as Orlando Furioso by Ariosto (1772-1773), Opere by Metastasio (1781-1783), and Opere teatrali by Goldoni (1788-1795).
The first print evokes the founding of the new capital of the Romanov empire by Tsar Peter the Great in the spring of 1703 when, in the middle of the Northern War, the emperor launched massive reclamation and canalization works of the swampy Neva Delta to create an anti-Swedish defense outpost on the Baltic. 
The Tsar entrusted to Domenico Trezzini, from Ticino, the projects for the Kronstadt Fortress on Kotlin Island and the Peter and Paul Fortress on the Island of the Hares, inaugurating the diaspora of Italian architects who would expand and beautify the city (Rastrelli, Rinaldi, Quarenghi, Rossi). The scene shows the Tsar – the taumaturgical builder of an “apostolic” capital, snatched from the sea like a Venice of the north – examining the map of the military citadel in the company of an architect and intendants; all around are laborers, stonecutters, carpenters, and bricklayers intent on the construction work. In the second engraving, Catherine the Great, who continued the work of modernizing Russia according to the principles of enlightened reformism, and who was a patron and protector
of the arts, is acclaimed by the people as “empress of all the Russias”; in the background of the image stands a basilica with a large hexastyle tympanum pronaos that seems to herald the future neoclassical reconstruction of St. Isaac’s Cathedral in Petersburg. Also for Catherine II, Novelli had painted on canvas in 1772 The Enea Family, shipped from Venice and displayed in the imperial gallery of the Hermitage next to a work by the famous painter Pompeo Batoni.

Bibliography: A. Pettoello, Libri illustrati veneziani del Settecento. Le pubblicazioni d’occasione, (Venice: 2005), pp. 207 s.;
A. Sponchiado, “Pietro Antonio Novelli,” in Tiepolo Piazzetta N. L’incanto del libro illustrato nel Settecento veneto, edited by D. Ton and V.C. Donvito, (Crocetta del Montello: 2012), pp. 258-261.