Catherine II of Russia — known to posterity as Catherine the Great — reigned as Empress from 1762 until her death in 1796, presiding over one of the most ambitious programmes of artistic and material acquisition in European history. Born Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst in 1729, she came to the Russian throne through a palace coup that deposed her husband, Peter III, and proceeded to govern an empire she made emphatically her own. Among the many dimensions of her cultural legacy, her relationship with gemstones, jewellery, and decorative hardstones stands as a defining chapter in the history of collecting. The objects she commissioned, purchased, and received as diplomatic gifts formed the nucleus of what would become the Hermitage Museum's gem and jewellery holdings, and several individual stones associated with her court remain among the most celebrated in gemmological literature.

The Imperial Context: Gems as Instruments of Power

In eighteenth-century European courts, gemstones were not merely ornaments; they were instruments of statecraft. The size and quality of a sovereign's jewels communicated dynastic legitimacy, military success, and economic strength to visiting ambassadors and rival monarchs alike. Catherine understood this language fluently. Upon seizing power, she inherited a significant collection assembled by her predecessors — Peter the Great, Anna of Russia, and Elizabeth Petrovna — but she expanded it with a systematic energy that none of them had matched. She employed court jewellers, maintained relationships with the leading gem merchants of Amsterdam and London, and accepted stones of extraordinary quality as part of diplomatic exchanges with the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and the courts of Western Europe.

The Russian Imperial regalia that Catherine wore and augmented included crowns, sceptres, orbs, and orders of chivalry set with diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and spinels of the first order. The Great Imperial Crown, created for her coronation in 1762 by the court jeweller Jérémie Pauzié, is set with nearly five thousand diamonds and surmounted by a large red spinel — the Côte de Bretagne's rival in European regal history — sourced from the Central Asian deposits that had supplied the Mughal court. That spinel, weighing approximately 398.72 carats, had been purchased by Tsar Alexis in the seventeenth century and remained one of the most recognisable stones in the Imperial treasury throughout Catherine's reign.

The Orlov Diamond

No single gemstone is more intimately associated with Catherine the Great than the Orlov Diamond. This exceptional stone — a large, dome-shaped, rose-cut diamond of Indian origin, weighing 189.62 carats and noted for its faint bluish-green tint and extraordinary clarity — was presented to the Empress in 1774 by her former favourite, Count Grigory Orlov, reportedly in an attempt to regain her affections. The stone had a documented history before reaching Russia: it is widely identified with the Mir-i-Mah diamond described in Persian sources and is believed to have served as the eye of a deity in a South Indian temple before passing through the hands of an Armenian merchant, Grigory Safras, who sold it to Orlov for a sum variously reported at around 400,000 roubles plus a lifetime annuity.

Catherine accepted the gift but did not restore Orlov to favour. She had the diamond mounted in the Imperial Sceptre — where it remains today, now housed in the Diamond Fund (Алмазный фонд) of the Moscow Kremlin — and the stone bears the count's name to this day. The Orlov is classified by gemmologists as a Type IIa diamond, indicating exceptional chemical purity, and its unusual rose-cut form, with its 180 facets arranged in a high cabochon-like profile, reflects the Indian lapidary tradition rather than the European brilliant cut that was becoming fashionable in Catherine's era. It is among the largest faceted diamonds in the world and arguably the finest stone directly associated with her reign.

The Shah Diamond and Diplomatic Gems

The Diamond Fund also preserves the Shah Diamond, a 88.70-carat elongated octahedral stone of Indian origin bearing three inscribed cartouches recording the names of its successive owners: the Ahmadnagar sultan Burhan Nizam Shah II (1591), the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (1641), and the Qajar ruler Fath Ali Shah (1824). Although the Shah Diamond reached Russia only in 1829 — presented by a Persian prince as partial reparation following the assassination of the Russian diplomat and playwright Alexander Griboedov — its trajectory through the Mughal and Persian courts mirrors the diplomatic gem culture that Catherine had cultivated throughout her reign. The stone is notable gemmologically for its natural trigon etch marks and for the extraordinary preservation of its original crystal faces, which were never fully faceted in the European sense.

Catherine herself received numerous stones through diplomatic channels. Persian and Ottoman embassies routinely brought gifts of rubies, emeralds, and turquoises; Indian merchants operating through the Baltic trade brought diamonds and sapphires. The Empress was a discerning recipient: contemporary accounts record that she examined stones personally and had strong preferences, favouring large, clean diamonds and the deep-coloured sapphires that were beginning to reach European markets from Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka) and from the mines of Kashmir, which were not yet systematically exploited but whose stones occasionally appeared in trade.

Carved Hardstones and the Hermitage Cameo Collection

Catherine's passion for gemstones extended well beyond faceted brilliants. She was an obsessive collector of engraved gems — glyptique, in the French term she would have used — and her correspondence reveals a collector's fever that she herself described with self-deprecating humour as a disease. In a famous letter to Friedrich Melchior Grimm, she wrote of her compulsion to acquire cameos and intaglios, noting that her cabinets could scarcely contain the accumulation.

Her collection of carved hardstones became the largest assembled by any single patron in the eighteenth century. She purchased en bloc several of the most celebrated European collections of the period, including the collection of the Duke of Orléans (acquired in 1787), which contained antique Greek and Roman intaglios of the highest quality, and the collection of the English banker John Lyde Brown, acquired in 1787, which added several thousand pieces. The stones employed in these carvings span the full range of cryptocrystalline and microcrystalline silica varieties — agate, carnelian, sardonyx, onyx, and chalcedony — as well as amethyst, garnet, lapis lazuli, and rock crystal. Many of the finest pieces were carved from layered sardonyx, exploiting the natural colour banding to achieve tonal contrast between figure and ground, a technique perfected by Hellenistic and Roman craftsmen and revived with great sophistication in the Renaissance.

Catherine also commissioned contemporary cameos as political instruments. Portraits of herself and allegorical scenes celebrating Russian military victories were carved by leading gem engravers of the period, including the German-born Johann Karl Klügel, who worked at the St Petersburg court. These objects circulated as diplomatic gifts, functioning as portable, durable, and unambiguously prestigious statements of Imperial identity.

The Hermitage today holds approximately ten thousand engraved gems, a collection that traces its origins almost entirely to Catherine's acquisitions. The stones range from Minoan seal stones of the second millennium BCE to eighteenth-century portrait cameos, and they constitute one of the most important repositories of glyptic art in the world.

The Snuff-Box Culture and Court Jewellers

Catherine's court sustained a culture of gem-set objets de vertu — snuff boxes, bonbonnières, étuis, and nécessaires — that represented the highest expression of the goldsmith's and lapidary's art in the period. These objects, typically set with diamonds, coloured stones, and enamel, were produced by the leading Parisian and St Petersburg workshops and exchanged as marks of Imperial favour. Catherine's preferred court jewellers included Jérémie Pauzié (Swiss-born, active in St Petersburg until 1764), whose memoirs provide an invaluable first-hand account of gem-setting practice at the Russian court, and later Louis-David Duval and Jean-Pierre Ador, both of Swiss origin, who supplied the Empress with objects of exceptional refinement.

The stones set in these objects were sourced from across the known gem-producing world. Chrysolite (peridot) from the Red Sea island of Zabargad, turquoise from Persia, topaz from the Ural Mountains — which Catherine actively promoted as a source of Imperial Russian gemstones — and chrysoberyl from Brazil all appear in the inventories of her court. The Ural deposits, known since the early eighteenth century, produced demantoid garnet, alexandrite (not yet discovered in her lifetime, but emerald and aquamarine were already being extracted), amethyst, and the pale-blue topaz that became associated with Russian Imperial jewellery. Catherine's patronage of the Ural mining industry was partly strategic: she wished to reduce Russian dependence on foreign gem imports and to establish a distinctly Russian material identity for the court's decorative arts.

The Sapphire of Catherine the Great

Among the coloured stones most closely associated with Catherine's personal collection, a large blue sapphire of Ceylonese origin occupies a prominent place in gemmological literature. The stone, sometimes referred to simply as the Sapphire of Catherine the Great, is a cushion-cut specimen of deep cornflower-blue colour weighing in excess of 200 carats; it was set in a brooch and formed part of the Imperial treasury. Its subsequent history is less well documented than that of the Orlov Diamond — the dispersal of portions of the Imperial collection following the 1917 Revolution introduced considerable uncertainty into the provenance of many stones — but it is cited in auction and dealer contexts as one of the largest faceted sapphires of Ceylonese origin known from the eighteenth century.

The broader point is significant: Catherine's court was one of the principal European destinations for fine Ceylonese sapphires in the second half of the eighteenth century, a period when the Kandyan Kingdom still controlled access to the Ratnapura and Elahera mining regions and when the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was the dominant intermediary in the trade. Stones of exceptional size and colour that might otherwise have been absorbed into the Mughal or Ottoman treasuries were increasingly finding their way to St Petersburg, reflecting both the growing wealth of the Russian Empire and Catherine's active cultivation of commercial relationships with the gem trade.

Legacy and the Hermitage

Catherine died in November 1796, leaving a collection of extraordinary breadth and depth. The Hermitage Museum — which she had founded in 1764 as a private retreat attached to the Winter Palace, initially to house her painting collection — became over time the repository for the gem and jewellery holdings as well, though the most important pieces of the Imperial regalia were maintained separately in the Diamond Fund. The Hermitage today displays a selection of Catherine's engraved gems, hardstone objects, and gem-set jewellery in its permanent galleries, and the collection continues to be the subject of scholarly study and international loan exhibitions.

The Diamond Fund in Moscow, administered by the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation, preserves the core of the Imperial gem regalia, including the Orlov Diamond in the Imperial Sceptre, the Great Imperial Crown with its spinel, and numerous other stones acquired during Catherine's reign. These objects are not for sale and have never entered the commercial market; they represent a continuous material thread from the eighteenth-century court to the present day.

Catherine's influence on the gem trade extended beyond her own acquisitions. Her patronage established St Petersburg as a centre of lapidary and jewellery production that would reach its apogee in the following century with the House of Fabergé, whose work — though post-dating Catherine by nearly a century — drew directly on the traditions of hardstone carving, gem-setting, and objets de vertu production that she had nurtured. The Fabergé workshops' celebrated use of Siberian nephrite, Ural rhodonite, and Caucasian obsidian in their hardstone figures and Easter eggs is the direct descendant of the lapidary culture Catherine had made central to Russian court identity.

For gemmologists and collectors, Catherine the Great represents something more than a famous historical owner of famous stones. She represents a moment when the systematic, intellectually engaged collection of gemstones — in all their forms, from faceted brilliants to antique intaglios to raw mineral specimens — became a recognised dimension of enlightened patronage. Her correspondence, her purchase records, and the objects themselves constitute a primary source for the history of the gem trade in the eighteenth century that has not yet been fully exploited by scholars.

Further Reading

• GIA Gems & Gemology: The Orlov Diamond
• GIA Gems & Gemology — Archive
• The State Hermitage Museum — Collections