Picturing the Greek Project: Catherine II's Iconography of Conquest and Culture

Abstract

This essay seeks to explore the original context surrounding a series of portraits of Catherine II that were commissioned in connection with the so-called Greek Project. Throughout the 1780s, the Empress of Russia was directly involved in the creation of an iconography of conquest and cultural enlightenment, turning to painters like Richard Brompton and Dmitrii Levitskii to visually articulate imperial aspirations with regard to the Tauride peninsula and beyond. The resulting figurative state discourse managed to look both East and West, and to display the Empress as the visual paradigm of an expanded, enlightened empire.