Walking around St. Petersburg with the Presidential Library. The Bronze Horseman

“Who of us, passing through Petrovsky Square, did not stop in front of the monument to Peter I and was not surprised by the wise Catherine, who knew how to express in it the extraordinary enterprise and courage of the founder of St. Petersburg, the Great Tsar, who organized and educated Russia, making it strong and powerful?” - writes the historian and theologian Anton Ivanovsky in the book Conversations about Peter the Great and his collaborators (1872), available on the Presidential Library’s portal. “But when viewing this monument, did any of us have to think about how much work and incredible efforts had to be used to build this marvelous monument, leading to amazement?..”. Today, the Presidential Library invites to visit Senate Square again, paying special attention to one of the symbols of the city on the Neva - the monument to Peter the Great, who, thanks to Alexander Pushkin, is called the Bronze Horseman.

• Catherine II treated Peter the Great with great respect and said that her main task was to continue the construction of the "temple" he had conceived - the Russian Empire. The idea of perpetuating the memory of the first Russian emperor came to her in 1765. On the advice of Denis Diderot, Catherine chose the well-known, but by no means fashionable French sculptor Falcone to create the sculpture. The philosopher, feeling the full measure of his responsibility to the Russian Empress, admonished his friend: “Remember, Falcone, that you must either die at work, or create something great.”
• Concluding an agreement with the sculptor, who undertook to complete the work in eight years, the Russian envoy in Paris, Prince Dmitry Golitsyn, emphasized such a feature of Falconet as disinterestedness. Although Golitsyn offered Falcone a reward one and a half times less than other artists requested for similar work, he "himself found such a figure exaggerated" and agreed to much less money. In September 1766, Falconet left for Petersburg. Of the 25 boxes he took with him, only one contained the artist's belongings - the rest were filled with books, engravings and casts.
• Difficulties for the sculptor began already at the stage of discussing the project. There was no consensus on how Peter I should appear. Some advised to sculpt Peter Alekseevich in the form of a Roman emperor, others - to build a monument in the form of a fountain surrounded by allegorical figures. There were also curious proposals: to portray Peter so that his right eye looked at the Admiralty, and his left eye at the building of the Twelve Collegia. As a result, Falconet insisted on his own vision of the monument. He depicted Peter in motion, removing details that could distract attention from the image of the tsar-creator. The role of Peter as a victorious commander is emphasized by a laurel wreath and a sword; a pedestal in the form of a huge rock reminds of the difficulties overcome, and a snake under the feet of a rearing horse symbolizes the defeated enemy forces.
• There were some troubles at the stage of casting the sculpture. When part of the clay mold was already filled, the pipe through which the bronze was poured burst. All the workers fled in fear, except for the cannon caster Emelyan Khailov, who managed to stop the metal spill. As a result, the casting was completed with minor errors, but thanks to the skill of the artist, there were practically no traces of soldering left.
• When it came time to look for a stone for the foot of the monument, the Academy of Arts "published its required size - five fathoms in length, two fathoms and half an arshin of width, one fathom and two arshins of height". Soon a peasant from the village of Lakhta came to the Academy and said that “6 versts from the shore of the Gulf of Finland ... there is a huge boulder called Stone Mountain”. According to local legend, Peter himself repeatedly climbed it to survey the surroundings. Transportation of the Thunder Stone, as it was also called, weighing 1600 tons, took about a year. At first he was dragged by huge copper sledges, rolled on copper balls along copper-studded wooden troughs. Every day, 400 people moved them about 200 meters. A drummer standing on a stone gave signals that made the efforts of the workers more united. Having dragged the granite giant to the shore, it was loaded onto a special ship. On October 7, 1770, he was unloaded at the Senate Square.
• The idea of the inscription on the monument belongs to Falconet, who suggested: “At the foot of the statue, I would place this brief inscription: Peter the Great was erected by Catherine the Second. I would very much like that they would guess not to write anything more on the stone itself. The Empress liked the idea. As a result, an inscription in Russian and Latin was embossed on the monument, which reads: “TO PETER the first EKATERINA second summer 1782” on one side of the monument and “PETRO primo CATHARINA secunda MDCCLXXXII” on the other, emphasizing the empress’s intention: to establish a line of succession with the deeds of Peter Great.
• The grand opening of the monument to Peter I on Senate Square took place on August 18 (7 according to the old style) in 1782. Later, thanks to the famous poem by Pushkin, the sculpture was called "The Bronze Horseman", although in fact it was made of bronze. One of the city's beliefs says that as long as the Bronze Horseman stands on the banks of the Neva, nothing can happen to St. Petersburg.

The institution’s portal and the collections contain numerous images of the monument, made in different eras and included in the section Senate Square in Postcards of the collection St. Petersburg, as well as with unique materials that reveal the history of its creation, including research, included in the collection Catherine II (1729-1796).