‘Nevsky’ Column Table
Designed by XXX, this columned table translates into furniture the tetrastyle portico of the Nevsky Gate of the Peter and Paul Fortress in Saint Petersburg. Built in 1787 to Nikolay Lvov’s designs and faced in granite, the gate is a Neoclassical composition of Tuscan columns coupled in pairs and bound together by massive bands of diamond-point rustication, which gird the lower shafts and lend the whole a severity fitting its setting.
The gate takes its name from the Neva, the river from which Alexander Nevsky, Orthodox saint and Russian national hero, took his epithet — and whom Peter the Great made patron of his new capital by having his relics brought to Saint Petersburg in 1724. During the Great Northern War against Sweden, Peter had founded the fortress in 1703 on Hare Island, the first stone of a capital turned towards Europe; the Peter and Paul Cathedral (1712–33), at its centre, became the Romanov necropolis, where lie among others Peter himself and Catherine II. Eisenstein’s celebrated film Alexander Nevsky (1938), in which the prince confronts the Teutonic Knights — an evident echo of the threat Nazi Germany then posed to the USSR — attests to the hero’s hold on Russian memory across changes of regime: the first tsars, the Russian empire and even the USSR.
The motto on the architrave of the temple front, Virtus junxit mors non separabit—”what virtue has joined, death shall not separate” — alludes to the diamond rustication that binds the columns of the gate in pairs, while the inscription on each side of the table, Ordo ab chaos, “order out of chaos”, refers to the architect’s craft.
