Before leaving for Europe this summer I met a man from St. Petersburg who told me that if I saw only one thing in Russia it should be the Amber Room at the (Catherine) Summer Palace in Pushkin. But when we arrived at the gates my heart fell. In St. Petersburg the architectural ornament had been dramatic but perfectly pitched, executed with unparallelled fineness. Here in Pushkin the facades felt overwrought. There were monstrously-scaled caryatids holding up the walls, similar to the ones at Sanssouci, but without their grace and severity. The blue and gold paint seemed too bright, a bit vulgar. My discomfort grew stronger after we moved inside. In the (accurately-named) Grand Hall gold ornament rose in stiff waves across the walls. And in the Amber Room mosaics of the luminous stone encrusted every side. The ornament was as spectacular as that in the Winter Palace at the Hermitage, but denser – it sucked the air, and pleasure, right out of the rooms.
On the way out we passed through a narrow hall with small black-and-white photos showing the state of the Palace during WWII, when it had been raided and bombed. All that remained of the place were brick walls and roof rafters. Over the following decades the Palace was reconstructed, with considerable care, in accordance with original documents and photographs. (The Palace is so large that this renovation is still underway.) The rooms we visited had been restored with incredible skill; there’s obvious contemporary talent in Russia for parquetry, mosaic, plasterwork, masonry and metalwork. But I don’t think the restoration represents the original designs faithfully. I can’t quite believe that the eighteenth-century craftsmen who built the Winter Palace built the Summer Palace. They’re entirely different things.