She used the tools of art buying and art creation to heighten her reputation, increase her cultural capital, spread her notoriety, and compete with (and send a message to) the elite in nations abroad. Of the many physical and literary portraits that exist of Catherine, Jaques’s stands out for creating a modern and complex view of the empress that celebrates her as an emotionally intelligent statesperson and a brilliant, sensual woman who critically indulged in an image-advancing hobby.Ĭatherine, as Jaques shows, made art a collaborator in many of her operations. In The Empress of Art: Catherine the Great and the Transformation of Russia, Susan Jaques reveals eighteenth-century Russia’s most powerful woman through her passion for art and architecture, rather than for men. On the other hand, female biographers such as Virginia Rounding in her Catherine the Great: Love, Sex, and Power capitalize on readers’ prurient interest about the empress’s carnal prowess it’s difficult to imagine a biography about a man bearing a subtitle preoccupied with eroticism. Alexander includes judgmental fixation on Catherine’s sexuality and demonstrates the male writer’s inability to view his subject through her own, female, perspective-a failure in a biographical writing if there ever was one. Catherine the Great: Life and Legend by John T. Petersburg, and the magnificent architectural wonder the city became is largely her doing.īiographies about Catherine the Great are fraught with problems. Catherine also spearheaded the further expansion of St.
She was a self-proclaimed "glutton for art" and she would be responsible for the creation of the Hermitage, one of the largest museums in the world, second only to the Louvre. She felt that the best way to do this was through a ravenous acquisition of art, which Catherine often used as a form of diplomacy with other powers throughout Europe. Intelligent and determined, Catherine modeled herself off of her grandfather in-law, Peter the Great, and sought to further modernize and westernize Russia. She then staged a coup that ended with him being strangled with his own scarf in the halls of the palace, and she being crowned the Empress of Russia.
A German princess who married a decadent and lazy Russian prince, she mobilized support amongst the nobles, playing off of her husband's increasing corruption and abuse of power.
This is an art-oriented biograph of the mighty Catherine the Great, who rose from seemingly innocuous beginnings.
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