• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

All Empress Elizabeth had to decide was where her Amber Room should go. Initially, she ordered that it be installed in a small room in the new Winter Palace, only to change her mind and have it moved to a large hall. But there wasn't enough Prussian amber. Martelli decided to fill in the gaps between the amber panels (that had come from Berlin) with fifty-two gilt-edged mirrored pillars. The Russian court made a set but they were the wrong size; orders were sent to Britain but they were never honoured. Only on 16 September 1745 was the enlarged Amber Room completed, using mirrors that came from France.

But Elizabeth was still unhappy and ordered the Amber Room be moved three more times, into ever-larger rooms, forcing Martelli to fill more gaps with mirrors and foil-backed glass. In 1745 the new King of Prussia, Frederick the Great, heard about the travails of the Amber Room and decided to combine diplomacy with a gift. Three ornate mirror frames, also made from amber, had been designed as centrepieces for the walls of the Amber Room, but Empress Elizabeth needed four frames to complete the set. Frederick II ordered his craftsmen in Konigsberg to manufacture this fourth frame for 2,000 talers.15 It was sent to St Petersburg along with a poem, The Allegory of the Victories and Heroic Deeds of the Empress.

But after the four amber mirror frames had been hung, the Empress ordered that the Amber Room be moved again, to outside her bedroom. She then decided that such an innovative and luxurious curio should be used to impress foreign embassies. The roving Amber Room was taken down and reassembled again as a reception hall for ambassadors.16

No one was surprised when it began to fall to pieces. Kuchumov found this report dated 1746: 'Because of the changes in temperature sections [of the Amber Room] have been damaged. One post is warped. It has been repaired by Master Enger. Also rather a lot of pieces of [amber] have detached themselves from the walls and have gone missing.'17 Rather than restore it, in July 1755 the Empress ordered V. Fermor, head of the Chancellery of the Imperial Study, to remove the Amber Room from the Winter Palace altogether and transport it, each panel and frame taken by hand, to the Catherine Palace in Tsarskoye Selo.

Here it was to be reconstructed in an even larger chamber. Bartolomeo Rastrelli, an Italian architect, was ordered to supervise the project and Martelli was once again hired to install the room. But there was no money for more amber. Instead, fake panels, glass backed with golden foil, and gilded mirrors were employed. At the centre of the golden enfilades the Amber Room was erected, between the Portrait Hall and Picture Hall, where it would be maintained by Friedrich Roggenbuch, an amber specialist brought from Prussia.

The Amber Room would not remain in its patchwork state for much longer. When Catherine, an ingenue from Germany, was crowned Empress of All Russia on 22 September 1762 (dressed in what Lord Buckingham described as 4,000 ermine pelts embroidered with thousands of precious stones, her crown smelted from a pound of gold and twenty pounds of silver), she decided that the palaces of the Tsarskoye Selo would be overhauled.18

Catherine II commissioned John Bush, her British horticulturist, to lay out new gardens with busts of Cicero, Demosthenes and Junius Brutus. Beyond them was erected La Pyramide Egyptienne, a necropolis for the royal greyhounds, and UArc Triomphal de Prince Orloff a tribute to one of her many lovers, Gregory Orlov (who had helped bring her to power by overthrowing her husband, Tsar Peter III). 'There is going to be terrible upheaval in the domestic arrangements at Tsarskoye Selo,' Catherine II warned in a letter of 13 April 1778. 'The Empress will have ten rooms and will ransack all the books in her library for designs for their decoration and her imagination will have free reign.'19

Born in Stettin, a German town close to the Baltic coast (now Szczecin in north-western Poland), Catherine II must have