The draftsman, engraver and etcher Alexey Yakovlevich Kolpashnikov (1744–1814) came from an impoverished noble family. He began studying the art of engraving under the mentorship of Efim Vinogradov and Alexey Grekov, heads of the Engraving Chamber of the Academy of Sciences. In 1864, he also studied under the French engraver Antoine Radigues. In 1773, Kolpashnikov received the title of an apprentice, in 1783 he was recognized as a master, and in 1795 he resigned.
Alexey Kolpashnikov worked in his own printing house, where he engraved images of fireworks and illuminations, portraits, landscapes, urban landscapes, and images of the Kunstkamera exhibits. He also created illustrations for the works of travelers-naturalists Ivan Lepyokhin, Peter Pallas, Georges-Louis Buffon and the 10-volume encyclopedia “The Spectacle of Nature and the Arts”.
Kolpashnikov engraved the portrait of Peter the Great for “The Life of Peter the Great”, a book by Antonio Catiforo.
Сatiforo was an ethnic Greek and a younger contemporary of Peter. He was a priest in an Orthodox church in Venice, a supporter of the Enlightenment and a polyglot. Alexander Menshikov invited him to the Russian service and he agreed. On his way to Russia Catiforo survived a shipwreck and returned to Italy, where he began working on this remarkable book. “The Life of Peter the Great” became the first full-fledged biography of the emperor written in the 18th century. Until then, the authors limited themselves to individual episodes of the life of the tsar. While working on the book, Catiforo reworked disparate materials about the life of Peter I, created earlier by English and Dutch authors as well as authors from other countries.
Peter the Great appears in Antonio Catiforo’s book primarily as a talented autocrat, the creator of a powerful Orthodox power and an unquestionably competent reformer. The author drew attention to Peter’s meritocracy and gave examples of how he selected and nominated associates according to their personal qualities without relying on titles and origin.
In 1742, empress Elizabeth Petrovna personally entrusted the translation of the book to the “translator of useful books” Stepan Ivanovich Pisarev. By 1743, the translation was already complete, however, in the Russian Empire the book was published only in 1772, 36 years after the first publication in Venice.
