Photo credit: the gilded gate at the entrance to the courtyard of the Catherine Palace in Tsarskoe Selo, St. Petersburg / Alex 'Florstein' Fedorov / ru.wikipedia.org (CC BY-SA 4.0)
French experts are helping their Russian colleagues to restore the interiors of the Catherine Palace, the Petersburg Diary writes. The Tsarskoye Selo Museum-Reserve received digitized albums of colored engravings. They were provided by the French National Institute of Art History. These materials are needed to recreate the private chambers of Catherine II in the Zubovsky wing. The Empress herself said that they are decorated in the style of "pure Raphaelism".
The palace architects Charles Cameron and Giacomo Quarenghi created the sketches of the chambers. Catherine herself made some amendments to them.
The restoration project for the Catherine Palace was prepared almost 50 years ago. It took the specialists many hours of the archival work, as they had to find the information about the palace that survived to this day.
The images found in the library of the French institute will help understand the configuration and color of the palace's interiors. They will be complemented by the watercolors of Eduard Hau and Luigi Premazzi, as well as the autochromes of photographer Andrei Zeest, taken in 1917.
Russkiy Mir
