With Susan Jaques

In September 1778, Russia’s art-loving tsarina Catherine the Great whisked a letter off to her Rome art dealer.: “I will make a vow to St. Raphael that I will have loggias built whatever the cost and will place the copies in them…I will have neither peace nor repose until this project is underway.” By November, the scaffolding was up at the Vatican. A decade later, an exact replica of the Raphael Loggia was unveiled at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.
Completed in 1519 for the Vatican, the celebrated Raphael Loggia featured a vaulted ceiling with 52 biblical episodes – 48 from the Old Testament and four from the New Testament. Each of its thirteen bays contained four frescoes, starting with the Creation and ending with the Last Supper. An instant hit, the Loggia came to be known as Raphael’s Bible. Raphael drew inspiration from a variety of sources including the Farnese Cup, antique sculpture, and early Christian mosaics. Vasari described the Loggia’s grotesques, from the newly discovered grotta of Nero’s Golden House, as the “most lovely and capricious inventions…”
Catherine the Great’s passion for Raphael didn’t end with the Loggia. She acquired two of his paintings -- St. George and the Dragon (secretly sold by Stalin to Andrew Mellon for the National Gallery of Art, DC) and The Madonna with Beardless St. Joseph (Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg). Join Susan Jaques, author of The Empress of Art: Catherine the Great and the Transformation of Russia, for an in-depth look at Raphael’s masterpiece and its replica.