ABSTRACT
The traveller who leaves St Petersburg in winter by the southbound road meets Egyptian sphinxes in the snow at Pulkovo, where the road branches. Perhaps the most surprising of these Egyptian images at Tsarskoye Selo is the entrance gate where the St Petersburg road enters the park on the north-west side. The creation of the Tsarskoye Selo gate falls within a period when there was quite a strong Russian interest in the burgeoning academic discipline of Egyptology, and particularly in the decipherment of hieroglyphs. An early example of the Egyptian style in interiors is provided by the house at Ostankino, built and decorated for Count Nikolai Sheremetev through the 1790s by Giacomo Quarenghi and others, and finished in 1801. The design is a more systematically Egyptian elaboration of the type of furniture with sphinx monopod legs already familiar in Russia in the 1790s and undoubtedly imported from France, where it was already prominent in pre-Napoleonic neoclassicism.
