The Invisible Statue

The spire of the Admiralty is visible from a great distance, piercing the Petersburg skies. If you walk along bustling Nevsky prospect, through Palace Square or along the eastern “nose” of Vasiliyevsky Island, your eyes are bound to be attracted to this gilded spire, crowned by a weathervane in the shape of a ship. The spire is St. Petersburgs’s official symbol, and, on a sunny day, it shines so brightly that one would be excused for thinking it was the sun itself.

Just below the spire, on the colonnade, there is a row of antique statues all around the building. On the eastern, northern and southern sides there are seven of these statues. But on the western side, there are just six. A gap as obvious as a missing tooth indicates that a statue is missing. Where has this mysterious seventh western statue gone?

The cornerstone for St. Petersburg’s Admiralty building, which now houses the Leningrad Naval Base, was laid on November 5, 1704. The building was designed by Tsar Peter the Great to serve simultaneously as a fort and a shipyard. Ivan Korobov took up the construction of this building where Peter left off – by 1732 it had become a two-storey building in the shape of a Russian “П”, with a tower and a spire. The architect who finished the building was Andreyan Zakharov, and the building owes most today to his hand. Construction was completed in 1812 and that fall 28 statues – 7 for each side – were placed upon the collonade. The statues were made of pudost stone, specially procured from the village of Pudost, near Petersburg. There were two each of 14 graven images – of the four winds, the four elements, the four seasons, Isis (Egyptian goddess and creator of navigation) and Urania (the muse of Astronomy).

The missing statue on the western side is Urania.

In 1823, in addition to the 28 original statues, another 30 were placed on the colonnade and other Admiralty buildings. The grand sculptural ensemble had no rival in the city. But, by 1960, the statues had suffered greatly under the elements. At that time, it was decided to recreate the colonnade statues in copper. But many of the other statues were missing. Nearly a century before, 22 of the 30 statues placed in 1823 had been destroyed on Alexander II’s orders. Sculptures depicting the “Four Parts of the World,” the twelve months of the year and the six major rivers in Russia had been smashed in 1860 at a cost of just over 45 rubles, the broken shards sold to be used in the foundations of buildings along Nevsky prospect. It was decided that recreating these 22 statues would be too costly.

It turns out that there is an interesting story behind the 22 sculptures’ destruction. In 1819, Tsar Alexander I decided to rebuild St. Isaac’s Cathedral, located not far from the Admiralty. During the reconstruction, St. Isaac’s was relocated to one of the Admiralty’s pavilions (the same pavilion which, during the Soviet era, was turned into a disco for naval college students, but that is neither here nor there). The “temporary” relocation lasted 40 years, during which the Orthodox Church repeatedly argued for the destruction of the pagan statues hovering above the visiting St. Isaac’s. The Church lobbied so hard that even the innocent weathervane was endangered – the Synod wanted to swap the ship out for a cross. Needless to say, the half-nude classical statues along the collonade also came under fire…

The 36 statues that survived Alexander II’s reign stood undisturbed until the Second World War, when, in 1942, a Nazi bombing destroyed six of the sculptures along the collonade. Immediately after the war, these were restored by making cement copies of their surviving “twins.”

In the early 1980s, two of the cement sculptures – “Water” and “Earth” – simply crumbled. “Fortunately, it happened at night and no one was hurt,” said sculptor Konstantin Bobkov. Bobkov, who is 73 years old, has been working on the Admiralty statues for twenty years, having taken charge of the building’s sculptural ensemble in 1984.

Bobkov’s workshop is located in an old, two-storey brick building a ten-minute walk from the Admiralty. In the 19th century, this modest building served as a chapel. Bobkov considers himself lucky: the building has a heat stove to make up for the fact that the central heating has been out of order for several years, making it as cold inside as out during the depth of winter. Now Bobkov heats his workshop with specially acquired firewood – redundant chairs and parquet from the Public Library. The library’s flooring was recently replaced and a friend who works there helped Bobkov transport the parquet from the dump to the workshop. “This is how we live, like under the [Leningrad] Siege,” Bobkov joked.

It would not have been very difficult to restore the statues, had exact drawings of them been preserved. But Admiralty architect Andreyan Zakharov died in 1811, leaving only rough sketches. He never saw his work completed. After his death, the architects Shchedrin, Pimenov and Demut-Malinovsky continued work on the statues. The backsides of many statues, which cannot be seen from below, were very roughly made. “Imagine, the hands of some statues look like sausages,” Bobkov said. To get closer to Zakharov’s original concept, Bobkov has, for years, studied a huge quantity of drawings, meticulously measured the remaining statues, and searched the world for statues similar to the Admiralty ensemble. There are comparable examples in the Hermitage, the Summer Garden and Versailles. In the 1980s, Bobkov traveled to Paris to make drawings of the statues there which inspired Zakharov in his work on the Admiralty. “I was lucky, because, in the Soviet era, I was working with antiquity, instead of making busts of Lenin,” Bobkov joked.

The (now missing) copper statue of Urania – placed in the 1960s – stood on the west side of the tower until 1992, when it was taken down because it had developed cracks. Bobkov surmised that Urania was damaged by steeplejacks who were gilding the spire. They attached their ropes to it, he said, using the Muse of Astronomy as a belay anchor.

In the 1990s, St. Petersburg’s Committee for State Control, Use and Preservation of Historical and Cultural Monuments ordered that Urania be recreated. But the funds to actually carry out the restoration were allocated from city coffers only at the end of last year. The St. Petersburg restoration firm Cast won the city’s tender and today the all-but-restored Urania stands in Cast’s workshop. The two-meter high, 200-kilogram Muse of Astronomy is being prepared for painting and has become the workshop staff’s mascot.

According to Victor Zhivan, the director of Cast, which built Urania according to Bobkov’s model, the statue will take its place on the colonnade this summer.

Standing next to Urania in the workshop are plaster models – one final size and one that is one-fourth size. The former has been cut up into several parts.

Despite the company’s name, the Admiralty sculptures are not cast from copper. Instead, a special technique, called hammer forging, is used. This method uses the natural plasticity of copper to stretch and bend it under the repeated strikes of a hammer.  The technique is virtually unchanged from the 17th century (the Statue of Liberty was made much the same way). The skilled craftsman must “feel” the material he is working with – sheet copper can be easily torn by the unfortunate strike of a hammer. Statues made using this technique are hollow and have the advantage of being less expensive and lighter than cast statues.

Urania was recreated step-by-step.  Bobkov studied drawings of the statue, then he built a plaster model – first one-fourth and then actual size (see photo, below). The model was covered with grease and its parts were dressed in cement cocoons. This creates cement molds that are used for the hammer forging, which is done with many small hammers of various shapes, depending on which form the metal is to take. Then Urania’s completed parts were welded together. Crossbars were placed inside to help the final statue maintain its shape. Finally, the statue was degreased, primed and painted with white-grey oil paints, to give it an appearance strikingly similar to its pudost stone neighbors.

Zhivan said that the colonnade’s other statues are also in bad shape: “The problem is not only Urania. We examined seven other statues and came to the conclusion that they also need to be removed from the tower and restored. The colonnade itself and the bases of the statues need restoration as well.”

Having started this work, Bobkov cannot foresee stopping until he has returned the building to the way it looked before Alexander II. So he has made cast models of all twenty-two destroyed statues. “When I meet sculptor colleagues and tell them I am working on the Admiralty statues without a contract, they are very surprised,” he said.

Few Petersburgers know that some of the Admiralty’s sculptures have been missing for over a century. In fact, former chairman of the afore-mentioned committee concerned with historic monuments, Nikita Yaveyn, knew nothing about the other statues before his committee began working with Bobkov. “I used to walk around here all the time as a child with my dad and never saw these statues,” he said.

Authorities confirm that the Admiralty is in need of restoration. “The Admiralty’s condition varies. On one side of the façade, it is good, but inside, from the yard side, it is much worse,” said Maxim Filipovich, an expert at the cultural monument committee. “This year, we plan to restore the tower’s façades, as well as the seven statues on the tower on the side facing the park. As for the sculptures that were destroyed in 1860, there are no plans, so I cannot say anything about this.” Today, where the missing statues should be, there are black anchors and cannonballs.

It is not likely that, within the coming decade, Petersburgers and visitors will see reconstructions of the statues that Alexander II destroyed. The city must first restore the 28 sculptures which adorn the colonnade. But one cannot help but hope that one day the Admiralty statues will be restored in their entirety. As the original architect, Andreyan Zakharov, wrote: “Without decoration, the façade will not look right, its beauty will be lost and the proportion of all its parts will be distorted.”  RL