Vincenzo Brenna

Who was Vincenzo Brenna?

Vincenzo Brenna was an Italian architect and painter who was the house architect of Paul I of Russia. Brenna was hired by Paul and his spouse Maria Fyodorovna as interior decorator in 1781 and by the end of 1780s became the couple's leading architect. Brenna worked on Pavlovsk Palace and Gatchina palaces, rebuilt Saint Isaac's Cathedral, and most notably created Saint Michael's Castle in Saint Petersburg. Most of his architectural works were created concurrently during Paul's brief reign. Soon after Paul was murdered in a palace coup Brenna, renowned for fraud and embezzlement barely tolerated by his late patron, retired and left Russia for an uneventful life in Saxony.

Brenna never reached the level of his better known contemporaries Giacomo Quarenghi, Charles Cameron and Vasili Bazhenov and was soon surpassed by his own trainee Carlo Rossi. Nevertheless, historians Igor Grabar, Nikolay Lanceray and Dmitry Shvidkovsky praised him for sincere and unrestricted naturalism of his graphic work and considered him to be the watershed between the Age of Enlightenment and Romanticism in Russian architecture.