Monument to Peter I near Mikhailovsky Castle

In front of the main façade of Mikhailovsky Castle, on a massive pedestal, rises a bronze horseman — Peter the Great mounted on his steed. It is the earliest equestrian sculpture in all of Russian art, the work of an Italian master who entered the service of the Russian court — Bartolomeo Carlo Rastrelli the Elder, father of the celebrated architect Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli.

The idea for the statue arose during the tsar's lifetime, in 1716: the sculptor's surviving drawings depict Peter in antique dress, in the manner of a Roman emperor. A lead model was cast as early as 1717, but the final version took shape slowly — the master modelled the parts of the horse and the figure at full scale, while casting the whole in one piece was technically unachievable at the time. After Peter's death in 1725 the work stalled, and it was only Empress Elizabeth Petrovna who returned to the idea. The sculptor himself did not live to see it completed — he died in 1744 — and the bronze casting was finished by his son together with the founder Alessandro Martelli in November 1747. The monument then stood without a home for almost half a century: it was planned first for Vasilyevsky Island, then in front of the Winter Palace, but Catherine II, on ascending the throne, considered Rastrelli's work outdated and preferred to commission her own monument, the future "Bronze Horseman" — while the statue itself she gave to Prince Potemkin, who left it lying idle near the Trinity Bridge. Only in 1800, by the will of Emperor Paul I, was the monument finally erected in front of the new Mikhailovsky Castle.

The new classicist pedestal was designed with no connection at all to Rastrelli's original project — its creation involved the architect Fyodor Volkov and the sculptors Mikhail Kozlovsky, Fyodor Gordeev and other masters. The equestrian figure itself stands about 4.6 metres tall, and together with the pedestal the monument reaches almost 11 metres. The pedestal is faced with Olonets marble in shades of pink, white and greenish tones, while its base is of grey Serdobol granite. The pedestal is decorated with bronze scenes on the theme of the Great Northern War: on the eastern side, the Battle of Poltava, and on the western side, the Battle of Hangö; these were executed under Kozlovsky's direction by the masters Ivan Terebenyov, Vasily Demut-Malinovsky and Ivan Moiseyev, and the casting was carried out by Vasily Yekimov.

On the southern side of the pedestal is a short inscription, "To his great-grandfather from his great-grandson, 1800" — with these words Paul I emphasised his direct kinship with the great ancestor, while pointedly omitting the name of his mother, Catherine II, who had kept him from power for so many years. During the Siege of Leningrad the statue was removed from its pedestal and buried in the ground to protect it from shelling, and after the war, in 1945, the monument was returned to its former place.

The monument is often compared with the later "Bronze Horseman" by Étienne Falconet, yet Rastrelli's composition is distinguished by the wholeness of its silhouette and is perceived harmoniously from any viewpoint, not only from a single angle. Today the monument remains part of the Mikhailovsky Castle ensemble in front of Manezhnaya Square and is considered one of the earliest and most original examples of 18th-century Russian monumental sculpture.