Art and nature, illusion and reality, are the two fields for conquest by wealth. Czarina Catherine II (1729 - 1796) won both, and these along with many other victories were to earn her the sobriquet of "the Great." Her palace was given the fashionable name of Hermitage, suggesting monastic retreat, neither inclination being remotely true for the resident. Under Catherine's guidance the palace came to enclose thousands of the finest paintings rubles could buy, as well as special greenhouses filled with exotic birds, monkeys, flowers, and trees, all defying the seasons. While the Pompadour had to content herself with interiors where thousands of porcelain flowers blossomed upon gilt-bronze stems, the czarina reveled in the real - whether in art or nature - housed separately but equally, a11 under her Teutonic thumb. Fascinated by the wonders of nature as well as culture, Catherine also kept a Wunderkammer, two large halls filled with her natural science collections, so that these could be studied just as closely as the splendors of art.

Unwanted and neglected by her parents, Catherine's brilliant, forceful personality (unusually well known from her frank Memoires) was etched along strikingly deliberate, often painfully and cruelly self-aware lines. Catherine's father was a military man, and both parents had hoped for a son, seldom forgiving what they considered to be her unfortunate sex. Like most prosperous Europeans of the time, the future czarina was educated by a French governess and had been on familiar ground with Gallic culture from her girlhood in Stettin, Pomerania. Catherine's lifelong interest in France may also have been influenced by that of Frederick the Great (rumored - wrongly - to have been her father). The king of Prussia was instrumental in seeing that Catherine - then the unprepossessing fifteen-year-old daughter of his field marshal, Prince Christian Augustus of Anhalt- Zerbst - came to wed her second cousin, one of the world's least appealing, although potentially most powerful, future leaders. The Grand Duke Peter was the grandson of Peter the Great, his mother the latter's eldest surviving daughter and his father duke of Holstein-Gottorp. Little Peter was adopted by his mother's sister, the amiable, childless, highly capable Czarina Elizabeth Petrovna (daughter of Peter the Great), who had seized control of Russia's government in 1741. It was she who arranged his marriage to Catherine. Homely, probably brutal, ignorant, politically inept, impotent, homosexual, and epileptic (the last two characteristics shared by his famous grandfather), Peter was also subject to tics, hallucinations, and a persecution mania, and was soon to be pockmarked. The unfortunate seventeen-year-old's major passion - toying with real as well as tin soldiers - was one of the very few that he and his intellectually venture some wife (sneering, he called her Madame Quick Wit) came to share. Poor Peter's persecution complex proved all too justified when, in 1762, the year of his mother's death and his accession as Peter III, Cather ine staged a palace revolution. She placed him under house arrest and he died under suspiciously convenient circumstances nine days later, doubtless dispatched by the princes Orlov at Catherine's behest. For the next thirty-four years the czarina proved herself to be an effective, often innovative, if increasingly despotic, ruler. Catherine spent about three billion dollars upon her innumerable lovers, many, many times more than the considerable, yet thriftily selective, sums that went into art. Catherine held her own in an erratic reign that swerved between the enlightened and the tyrannical, increasingly inclining toward the latter as she became ever more frightened by the violent excesses of the French Revolution. Many of these atrocities she came to believe originated with the philosophs she had patronized, and who, in turn, had supported her. Like most motives, those for Catherine's art collecting were mixed. She began buying paintings for the Winter Palace two years before Peter's death. Soon, as czarina, she needed to see herself in the great line of the world's major rulers, so, following the splendid examples of Alexander the Great and Louis XIV, Catherine used the arts to reflect and enhance the imperial power that was hers alone. The new czarina's personal device, a column, which is included in her portrait by Lampi (515), suggested the strength of Hercules (that hero had two of them), a suitable emblem for the duration of her rule and fortitude, but also an unconscious echoing of her phallic compulsions. Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, the Parisian portraitist who fled the French Revolution and found Russian sanctuary, garnered many commissions at Saint Petersburg. Recalling Catherine in her memoirs, she noted how she "had imagined her to be prodigiously tall, as high as her reputation." But by 1789, the sixty-year- old Catherine "was very fat (and toothless).... She still had a handsome face [the diplomatic painter found almost all those in power handsome and/or charming].... Genius was stamped upon her brow, which was broad and very high.... I have said that she was short, [yet] on days when she appeared in state, everything about her - the head held high, the eagle eyes, the assured bearing that comes with the habit of command - was so majestic that she seemed to rule the world."

The czarina may have identified herself with three Medici women, all of them, like herself, shifted from one culture to another in which they became leading collectors and patrons of the arts. Catherine and Marie de' Medici both wed kings of France. Upon baptism into the Russian Orthodox church (incurring great parental wrath), the Cerman princess changed her name from Sophie to Catherine whereupon she could have seen herself as one of the French queens reborn as she took on a new language and, in SophieCatherine's case, faith. The young czarina may also have linked herself with the "last of the royal race of the Medici," Anna Maria Ludovica de' Medici, who, like Catherine the Great, had been a grand duchess. Used to life-long neglect as a daughter and wife, Catherine was good at getting what she wanted. She was blessed with what used to be called "the common touch," endearing herself to many, often with faux-naif remarks, such as the flattering one she made to the French sculptor Falconet, claiming that "the least schoolchild knows more about sculpture than I!" In truth she was shrewd about using all the arts and many of the sciences not only to flatter her reign but more than occasionally to benefit Russia, the land she so loved that she asked her doctor to drain her of German blood and replace it with that of her new nation.

"God grant us our desires, and grant them speedily" was the toast closest to Catherine's heart, typifying her lusty appetite for men and masterpieces. Generally a shrewd purchaser of both, she did better with pictures, where the quality and quantity held up better over time.

Diderot wrote to Falconet, who was a fellow recipient of Catherine's largesse, "Ah! my friend... how we have changed! We sell our paintings and statues in peace time. Catherine buys them in the middle of a war [against the Turks]. The sciences, arts, taste and wisdom are moving North, and barbarism, with all that accompanies it, is descending upon the south!" In the 1780s Catherine's acquisitive instincts flagged. She wrote her advisers that space and funds for more pictures were lacking. With the czarina's death in 1796 the most magnificent phase of the Hermitage's expansion came to a close.