In the eighteenth century Petersburg owed its grandeur as a Baroque city largely to the work of imported Italian architects; but with the rise of French and English influence in the later decades of the old century and the first of the new the day of the Italians was over, there as elsewhere (see Chapter 1). Alexander I’s aspirations, after as well as before Waterloo, were wholly French, not Italian. The Committee for Construction and Hydraulic Works, indeed, which Alexander set up in 1816 to pass the designs of all public and private buildings in his capital, had a French military engineer, General Béthencourt, as its chairman. Yet the principal architect of the post-Napoleonic decades, Karl Ivanovich Rossi (1775-1849), although he had an Italian family name and was of Italian origin, was Russian-born and Russian-trained. Rossi’s General Staff Arches of 1819-29 and the vast hemicycle of which they are the centre continue happily the urbanistic tradition of the older generation; but the detail is Roman not Greek, and the taste altogether coarser and more provincial than that of Thomon and Zakharov (Plate 27B). This is even more true of his Alexandra Theatre of 1827-32 and his Senate and Synod of 1829-34. August Augustovich Monferran (1786-1858), to whom was assigned the building of St Isaac’s Cathedral[71] in 1817, a vast pile that he completed only in 1857 (Plate 27A), was French, despite the Russian form in which his name is here given, and actually a pupil of Percier. In his youth he had worked under Vignon on the Madeleine, moreover. Monferran lacked, like most of his own generation who remained in France, both the originality and the finesse of the earlier generation, just as Nicholas I lacked the taste of his brother Alexander I. A wealth of sumptuous materials, granites and marbles, marks this church, however, and the dome is of some importance in technical history because it is entirely framed in iron (see Chapter 7). Another typical monument in the Napoleonic tradition rose also from Monferran’s designs, the Alexander Column of 1829 in the Winter Palace Square (Plate 27B). This may well be the largest granite monolith in the world—a typically Russian claim—but it quite lacks the elegance of Alavoine’s still later Colonne de Juillet in Paris or the scale of Mills’s Washington Monument. The Triumphal Gate of 1833 by Vasili Petrovich Stasov (1769-1848) is a trabeated Greek Doric propylaeon, somewhat comparable to Nobile’s Burgtor in Vienna; more significant is the fact that, like the July Column in Paris and Monferran’s great dome, not to speak of a curious Egyptian suspension bridge of this period in Petersburg, this structure is all of metal.