200 ARCHITECTURE. 
At the time when Italy had only remains of the Roman monuments, and of 
the Greek and Etruscan, but already possessed large and beautiful Christian 
basilicas, when in France and Germany and England large churches shamed 
the works of past centuries, Russia was yet only inhabited by barbarians. 
In 957 the Russian princess Olga, the wife of Igor, was baptized in Constan- 
tinople, and returning to her native country, introduced civilization, together 
with the milder religion. From this period date the traces of the new 
Greek architecture which we meet here and there, as, for instance, the 
Kremlin in Moscow, built in the 14th century and destroyed in the year 1812. 
When Peter the Great removed his residence to the city of Petersburg, 
which he had founded, Russian edifices began to be built in a regular and 
modern style. Of these we have selected two for our account. 
1. Tae CHaper or THE Kwicuts or Matra in Sr. Pererspure. The 
Emperor Paul I. had givena palace in St. Petersburg to the Knights of Malta, 
and permitted them at the same time to erect a Catholic chapel. At that 
time Giacomo Quaranghi lived in St. Petersburg (born in 1744 at Bergamo, 
and died there in 1820), and the knights applied to him for a design for the 
chapel, which would certainly have been very beautiful if they had executed 
the portico he designed. But instead of this, the building, founded on the 
23d of August, 1798, received a facade which is represented in pl. 50, jig. 
11, which has four Corinthian half columns, and two small columns with a 
gable as door ornament ; jig. 10 represents the ground plan and the manner 
in which the chapel is united with the palace, and jig. 12 the lateral section 
of the chapel. The interior is in the basilica form, ending in a large apsis. 
Two rows of yellow marble columns divide the church into three aisles 51 
feet high. The breadth of the chapel is 50 feet, its length 100 feet. 
2. Sr. Isaac’s Cuurcn in Sr. Perersspure. After the fire which destroyed 
in 1710 the wooden church of St. Isaac of Dalmatia, standing upon the site 
now occupied by the statue of Peter the Great, and the two churches of 
the same saint which were in time built in another place, after designs by 
Maternowi and Rainaldi, had fallen into decay, the emperor Alexander I. 
resolved to rebuild it in a simple but effective manner, and intrusted Mon- 
ferrand with the design, which was accepted, and the erection of the 
building commenced on the 8th July, 1819. Pl. 47, jig. 7, shows the 
ground plan, jig. 8 the elevation of this church. Its exterior length is 312 
feet, the inner 297 feet 6 inches, and the greatest breadth is 192 feet. It 
covers 580,322 square feet, and is consequently somewhat smaller than 
Notre Dame in Paris, and is to St. Peter’s as 1: 3.44. On each long side, 
one of which fronts on the Place of the Admiralty, opposite the statue of 
Peter the Great and the Neva, is a portico, closely imitated from that 
of the Pantheon at Rome, but much more imposing, as the columns, 
which consist each of a single block of Finland marble, are 12 feet higher 
than those of the Pantheon, being 56 feet: high. The capitals and bases of 
the columns are cast in bronze. The short sides, which are east and west, 
have also porticoes, but less projecting, which were demanded by the rules 
200 
