Marble Bridge

The Marble Bridge, also known as the Palladian, Siberian Bridge, or Siberian Marble Gallery, closes the perspective of the Big Pond at its southwestern border in the Catherine Park of Pushkin. The gallery details — columns, capitals, pedestals, and balusters — were carved at the Yekaterinburg lapidary factory in the early 1770s based on a wooden model, and they were assembled in Tsarskoye Selo in 1774 by master Tortori and his assistants. According to some data, the assembly took two years, and I. F. Yakovkin attributed it to 1775–1776. The writer Ya. I. Saburov described the structure as if it were carved from a marble mountain in Athens, and the project idea traces back to the unrealized design by Andrea Palladio for the Rialto Bridge in Venice.