Antonio Rinaldi

Who was Antonio Rinaldi?

Antonio Rinaldi was an Italian architect, trained by Luigi Vanvitelli, who worked mainly in Russia.

In 1751, during a trip to England, he was summoned by hetman Kirill Razumovsky to decorate his residences in Ukraine. To this early period belong the Resurrection cathedral in Pochep near Bryansk and the Catherine Cathedral in Yamburg, now Kingisepp near St Petersburg, where Rinaldi successfully expressed the domed, centrally-planned form required by traditional Russian Orthodox practice in a confident Italian Late Baroque vocabulary.

His first important secular commission was the Novoznamenka chateau of Chancellor Woronzow. In 1754, he was appointed chief architect of the young court, i.e., the future Peter III and Catherine II, who resided at Oranienbaum. In that town he executed his best-known baroque designs: the Palace of Peter III, the sumptuously decorated Chinese Palace, and the Ice-Sliding Pavilion.

In the 1770s, Rinaldi served as the main architect of Count Orlov, who was Catherine's prime favourite and the most powerful man in the country.