The palace was built as a gift from Empress Catherine the Great for Count Grigory Orlov, her favourite and the most powerful Russian nobleman of the 1760s. Construction started in 1768 to designs by Antonio Rinaldi, who previously had helped decorate the grand palace at Caserta near Naples, and lasted for 17 years. The combination of sumptuous ornamentation with rigorously classicising monumentality, as practiced by Rinaldi, may be attributed to his earlier work under Luigi Vanvitelli in Italy.
The palace takes its name from its opulent decoration in a wide variety of polychrome marbles. A rough-grained Finnishgranite on the ground floor is in subtle contrast to polished pink Karelian marble of the pilasters and white Urals marble of capitals and festoons. Panels of veined bluish gray Urals marble separate the floors, while Tallinndolomite was employed for ornamental urns. In all, 32 disparate shades of marble were used to decorate the palace.
Fedot Shubin, Mikhail Kozlovsky, Stefano Torelli and other Russian and foreign craftsmen decorated the interior with inlaid coloured marbles, stucco, and statuary until 1785, by which time Count Orlov had already died (1783), and the Empress had the palace purchased for her own heirs. In 1797-1798 the structure was leased to Stanisław II Augustus, the last king of Poland. Thereafter the palace belonged to Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich and his heirs from the Konstantinovichi branch of the House of Romanov.
In 1843, Grand Duke Constantine Nikolayevich decided to redecorate the edifice, renaming it Constantine Palace and engaging Alexander Brullov as the architect. An adjacent church and other outbuildings were completely rebuilt, while the interior of the palace was refurbished, in keeping with the eclectic tastes of its new owner. Only the main staircase and the Marble Hall survived that refacing and still retain the refined stucco work and elaborate marble pattern of Rinaldi’s original decor.
During the Soviet era, the palace successively housed the Ministry of Labour (1917-19), the Academy of Material Culture (1919-36), and, most notably, the main local branch of the Moscow-based Central (i.e. National) Lenin Museum (1937-91) with sub-branches across Leningrad in Lenin’s memorial apartments all over the city – the places where he lived or stayed during his various periods in what was then Saint Petersburg.
[responsivevoice_button voice="UK English Female" buttontext="Listen to this Post"]Regional policy of the European Union
The Regional policy of the European Union (EU), also referred as Cohesion Policy, is a policy with the stated aim of improving the economic well-being of regions in the EU (European Committee of the Regions) and also to avoid regional disparities. More than one third of the EU's budget is devoted to this policy, which aims to remove economic, social and territorial disparities across the EU, restructure declining industrial areas and diversify rural areas which have declini...
