Peter the Great and Saint Petersburg
Peter the Great turned Russia towards Europe and built a new capital on the Baltic. The Academy of Arts was founded, portrait painting flourished, and Rastrelli's Baroque palaces and the colonnades of Neoclassicism gave the city its face.
Peter the Great travelled in Europe in 1697–1698 and came home determined to modernise everything, from the navy to dress. In 1703 he founded St Petersburg at the mouth of the Neva, on land conquered from Sweden, and moved the capital there. Foreign architects such as Domenico Trezzini and later Bartolomeo Rastrelli built the city.
Art became secular. Portraits, palaces and parks replaced the icon as the leading art form, and Russian painters were sent to Europe to learn. Empress Elizabeth had Rastrelli build the Winter Palace and the palace at Tsarskoye Selo in a sumptuous Baroque of white, gold and turquoise.
With Catherine the Great came Neoclassicism. She bought entire collections of Western art, the foundation of the Hermitage, and the Academy of Arts, founded in 1757, trained painters, sculptors and architects. Fyodor Rokotov, Dmitry Levitsky and Vladimir Borovikovsky made the portrait the great art of 18th-century Russia.