ABSTRACT

When compared with the work of Rastrelli, whose Winter Palace had only recently been completed, Kokorinov and Vallin de la Mothe’s design for the Academy of Arts is the essence of simplicity. Without elaborate statuary or plaster ornamentation, the main facade of the three-story building is marked by tetrastyle Tuscan porticos on either end and, in the center, a projecting pediment with two supporting columns on each side of a large window on the main level. This five-part division of a neoclassical facade, with an advanced central pediment, had been established by Le Vau, Perrault, and Le Brun on the East front of the Louvre. Unlike the French prototype, however, the Academy of Arts uses the more modest pilasters, rather than a colonnade, to defined the middle sections. Furthermore, the walls are not of natural stone, but of stuccoed brick, rusticated on the ground floor.