Marble Palace

Put your hand flat against the lower wall. The stone is cool and smooth, polished by weather and by two and a half centuries of passing sleeves. Now look up. The facade above you is not one colour but many. There is soft grey, warm pink and pale cream, set panel against panel like a quiet patchwork. Behind you, the wind comes off the Neva. In front of you stands one of the first buildings in Saint Petersburg dressed almost entirely in natural stone.

This is the Marble Palace. In a city of painted plaster, this was something new. Most of the grand houses along this embankment are brick, covered in stucco and coloured paint. Every few years they need a fresh coat. This palace took a different path. Its builders faced it in granite and marble, cut from quarries across the Russian Empire and beyond. Even today, when you walk along the river, the difference is easy to see. The surface has depth. It holds the light instead of simply reflecting it.

The story begins with a gift between two people. Empress Catherine the Second, often called Catherine the Great, commissioned the palace for Count Grigory Orlov. Orlov was her favourite for many years. He and his brothers helped bring her to the throne in the palace coup of 1762. A building of this cost was a very public way to say thank you. Construction started in the late 1760s and continued for well over a decade.

The architect was Antonio Rinaldi, an Italian who spent much of his career working for the Russian court. Rinaldi chose a calm, restrained style. You will not find the heavy gold swirls of the earlier Baroque palaces here. Instead, there are clean lines, pilasters — the flat columns set into the wall — and careful proportions. This is early Neoclassicism, the style that looked back to ancient Greece and Rome for order and balance.

Now for the first surprise. Orlov never lived to enjoy his palace. He died in 1783, before the building was fully finished. Catherine bought the palace back from his heirs. So the house built to honour one man passed quietly to others. In the decades that followed, it became a kind of grand guest house for people the crown wished to keep close.

One of those guests was Stanisław August Poniatowski, the last king of Poland. He was also, years earlier, one of Catherine's companions. After Poland was divided between its neighbours, he lost his throne. He came to Saint Petersburg and lived out his final years in this palace. He died here in 1798. Think about that as you look at the windows. A former king spent his last days behind this stone, far from the country he had ruled.

In the nineteenth century, the palace belonged to members of the imperial family, among them grand dukes named Konstantin. In the mid-nineteenth century, the architect Alexander Bryullov reworked many of the rooms inside to suit new tastes. Some interiors changed a great deal. But one important room kept much of Rinaldi's original design. This is the Marble Hall, and if you go inside, it is worth seeking out. Its walls are lined in coloured stone, much like the facade you are touching now.

Let us come back to the stone itself, because it is the heart of this building. The palace uses dozens of different types of marble and granite. Some came from Karelia, the forested region north of the city. Some came from the Ural Mountains, and some was brought from Italy. The builders chose each stone for its colour. Grey granite forms the solid base. Above it, lighter marbles mark the columns, the window frames and the decorative panels. The effect is subtle from far away and very rich up close.

The twentieth century brought a sharp change of direction. After the revolution, the palace served Soviet institutions. For several decades, it housed a branch of the Lenin Museum. Here is the second surprise. In the courtyard stood an armoured car, said to be the one from which Lenin spoke to crowds in 1917. A building made for a Tsarina's favourite became a shrine to the man who ended the Tsars. Few palaces in this city have changed meaning so completely.

When the Soviet Union ended, the Lenin Museum closed. The armoured car left. In the 1990s, the palace became part of the State Russian Museum, the city's great collection of Russian art. Today, the rooms host exhibitions, including foreign and modern art. That gives the visit an unusual feel. You can walk through eighteenth-century spaces and find twentieth-century paintings on the walls. The old and the new sit side by side.

Before you go in, look at the courtyard in front of the palace. A heavy bronze horseman stands there. This is the equestrian statue of Emperor Alexander the Third, made by the sculptor Paolo Trubetskoy. It first stood in front of a railway station in the city in the early twentieth century. It was moved here in the 1990s. Notice how solid it is. The horse is thick and low. The rider sits square and still, almost like a block.

This statue has always divided people. Many critics in its own time saw it as a portrait of heavy, immovable power. Locals made up mocking rhymes about it. According to a popular story, the sculptor said he had no interest in politics and had simply shown one animal sitting on another. Whether or not he really said this, the tale has stayed with the statue ever since. Walk around it slowly. From each angle, the mood changes.

Stand still for a moment before you leave. To one side, the open lawns of the Field of Mars stretch away. Behind you, the Neva moves wide and grey toward the sea. The palace sits between them, quieter than its neighbours, holding its colours in the northern light. As you walk on, keep looking at the walls of the city around you. You will start to notice which buildings are painted... and which, like this one, are made of stone all the way through.