Gilt and Glory

by wjw on September 28, 2017

IMG_4192More gilding from St. Petersburg— I have to think half the world’s gold supply is slathered over the buildings and monuments.  This is part of the Admiralty, originally a fortress built by Peter the Great, now an Empire-style complex built in the early 19th century.

The weathervane atop the tower is in the shape of a warship.  Nabokov once wrote a story about the spire.

This photo was taken quite late at night, after 10pm, but during the White Nights the sunsets go on quite literally for hours— and the sunrises too, I imagine, though I was never up to see one.

John F. MacMichael October 7, 2017 at 5:59 pm

Reminds me of a scene from “Scaramouche”:

“It was a room overwhelmingly gilded, with an abundance of ormolu encrustations on the furniture, in which it nowise differed from what was customary in the dwellings of people of birth and wealth. Never, indeed, was there a time in which so much gold was employed decoratively as in this age when coined gold was almost unprocurable, and paper money had been put into circulation to supply the lack. It was a saying of Andre-Louis’ that if these people could only have been induced to put the paper on their walls and the gold into their pockets, the finances of the kingdom might soon have been in better case.” “Scaramouche” Book 3, Chapter IV.

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