Catherine the Great Read Online Free Page B

kissed the life-giving cross, believed to be studded with a fragment from Christ’s crucifix, and followed Dimitry and Metropolitan Timofey past the massive, copper-plated doors into an aesthetic world that, for all her professions of loyalty to the Orthodox faith, she never fully understood.
    Already installed on tiered benches erected between the cathedral’s four greatinternal pillars was a select congregation of Court ladies, native dignitaries and foreign diplomats who had not taken part in the procession and had, as usual, been left uncertain about the arrangements until the last moment. Like the others, the French ambassador received his invitation only on 20 September, after frantic negotiations about precedence in the seating plan: ‘There was nothing they could have done to persuade me to appear at the coronation as a gawping tourist.’ 59 Facing the altar, in a gallery in front of the west wall, the diplomats occupied the first row with the Baltic nobility behind them, brigadiers in the third row and the Baltic merchants at the back. Female guests sat along the north wall, ranged according to rank behind Countess Anna Vorontsova, and the empress’s ladies and maids of honour. Opposite them was a gallery for the foremost Russian officials. Holders of the first three ranks on the Table decreed by Peter the Great in 1722 sat at the front with lesser-ranking bureaucrats further back. 60
    At the heart of the cathedral, within full view of all three stands, twelve steps led up to a dais, six feet high, fourteen feet long and five and a half feet wide, draped in red velvet and surrounded by balustrades carved with gilded hieroglyphs. Catherine’s throne had been sent from Persia for Tsar Boris Godunov at the end of the sixteenth century. To its right stood a gilded table for her regalia; to the left was a place for the young tsarevich. Above the throne, a huge velvet canopy, decorated with gold braid and fringed with lace, was suspended from the ceiling by a chain, joined to each corner by silken ropes in the shape of a pyramid. Into the lining of this canopy was sewn the imperial coat of arms, so that the empress, should she glance to the heavens during her coronation, would stare straight into the eyes of a double-headed eagle. 61
    By combining his knowledge of Renaissance engineering with rare sensitivity to Russian tradition, Fioravanti had created a building whose conventional exterior, modelled on the twelfth-century Cathedral of the Dormition in Vladimir, concealed one of the lightest and most spacious interiors in the Orthodox world. Yet it was by no means so cavernous as it was made to seem in the commemorative illustrations of Catherine’s coronation by Jean-Louis de Veilly, a French artist who had had a chequered career since arriving in St Petersburg from England in 1754. (His appointment to teach at the Academy of Fine Arts was terminated ‘thanks to the peculiarities of his character’ and the figures he painted on the floor of the Chinese Room at Tsarskoye Selo seemed ‘flushed and somehow drunken because of their slitty eyes’. 62 ) De Veilly evidently used illustrations of the Bourbon coronations as one of his models. But even had the Orthodox Church permitted the use of musical instruments to accompany the liturgy, therewould scarcely have been room for the 100-piece orchestra hidden behind the altar at Reims for the coronation of Louis XVI in 1775. 63 Barely a quarter of the size of Reims or Westminster Abbey, and much more intimate in atmosphere, the Dormition Cathedral had only limited space for guests. Competition for places was intensified by two eighteenth-century developments: the expansion of the noble elite and Peter the Great’s insistence that both sexes should attend Court ceremonials in a church conceived by its Muscovite founders as a strictly male preserve.
    Catherine’s nineteen-year-old friend, Princess Dashkova, who might have expected to benefit from the new dispensations,