UKHTOMSKY, Konstantin Andreyevich

Commissioned by Empress Catherine II in the late 1780s, the Raphael Loggias are the exact copy of the Gallery in the Papal Palace in Vatican City. The frescoes of the open loggias of the Papal Palace were painted after Raphael’s sketches. Their copies, made in Italy by a group of artists under the supervision of Christopher Unterberger, took their place in the gallery of a separate building erected by Giacomo Quarenghi. The Loggias vaults are decorated with scenes from biblical stories, the walls are covered with paintings with ornamentation motifs, known as “grotesques”.

Konstantin Andreyevich Ukhtomsky was a Russian watercolourist who recorded with precision the interiors in the New Hermitage in St. Petersburg.

Seeking to perpetuate Voltaire’s memory in Russia after his death, Empress Catherine II commissioned Jean-Antoine Houdon, then one of the most famous sculptors, to make the statue of the philosopher seated in an armchair that now adorns the Hermitage collection of Neoclassical sculpture. Two bronze statuettes - variants of the model for the sculpture ordered from Houdon by Voltaire’s niece and heiress, Madame Denis - were sent to the Russian empress in 1779. Suitably impressed, Catherine requested Houdon to produce a marble version for her as well (the first, virtually identical to the Hermitage work, was installed in the foyer of the Com�die-Fran�aise theatre in Paris). The statue was given a home in the empress’s summer residence at Tsarskoye Selo. In 1805, during the reign of Catherine’s grandson Alexander I, the statue was moved to the hermitage which housed Voltaire”’s celebrated library, acquired in its entirety from Madame Denis in 1778.