Vladimir Palace

The Vladimir Palace (Russian: Влади́мирский дворе́ц, Vladimirsky dvorets) is the former palace of Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich of Russia, son of Alexander II. It was one of the last imperial palaces to be constructed in Saint Petersburg, Russia. It was designed by a team of architects including Vasily Kenel, Aleksandr Rezanov, Andrei Huhn, Ieronim Kitner, Vladimir Shreter and Maximilian Messmacher. Construction work on the waterfront lasted from 1867 to 1872, additional construction and extensions continued in the 1880s and 1890s. Major restorations were made in the 1980s and in 2010.

Like the Winter Palace and the Marble Palace, the Vladimir Palace is on the waterfront of the South bank of the river Neva; the location on Palace Embankment was extremely prized by the Russian aristocracy. The Neo-renaissance façade, richly ornamented with stucco rustication, was patterned after Leon Battista Alberti's palazzi in Florence. The main porch is built of Bremen sandstone and adorned with griffins, coats-of-arms, and cast-iron lanterns. Other details are cast in portland cement.

The palace and its outbuildings contain some 360 rooms, all decorated in eclectic historic styles: Neo-Renaissance (reception room, parlor), Gothic Revival (dining room), Russian Revival (Oak Hall), Rococo (White Hall), Byzantine style (study), Louis XIV, various oriental styles, and so on. This interior ornamentation, further augmented by Maximilian Messmacher in 1881–1891, is considered by art historians, such as Nikolay Punin, a major monument to the 19th-century passion for historicism. Grand Duke Vladimir decorated his apartments with his collection of Russian paintings by the best artists of his time, such as Ilya Repin, Ivan Aivazovsky, Feodor Bruni, Vasili Vereshchagin, Ivan Kramskoy, Mikhail Vrubel, Nikolai Sverchkov and Rudolf Ferdinandovich Frentz.

Text adapted from “Vladimir Palace” on Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Vladimir Palace ranks #1,255 of 7,738 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #48 of the 141 mapped in Russia. Founded 1867, it is older than 7% of the atlas's dated landmarks — one of 562 atlas entries founded in the 19th century. Its Wikipedia articles were opened 5,029 times in the last 60 days, more than 84% of the atlas. 27 more atlas landmarks stand within 25 km. The nearest day-trip guide is Saint Petersburg, 1 km away. See how Russia compares in the castle statistics.

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