Love, betrayal and a flood that never happened: the Tretyakov Gallery’s great deception

Konstantin Flavitsky’s *Princess Tarakanova* (1864) moved Russia to tears and angered Alexander II. Inspired by real events, the painting changes their ending.

In the early 1770s, a mysterious woman in Italy claimed to be Empress Elizabeth Petrovna’s daughter and heir to the Russian throne. Catherine II sent Count Orlov to stop her. He won her trust, staged a fake wedding and lured her aboard a Russian ship in Livorno. She was taken to St Petersburg and imprisoned.

Flavitsky depicts her dying in her cell during the devastating flood of 1777, water rising as rats scramble across her bed. But the scene is fiction: she died of tuberculosis in December 1775, two years before the flood, taking her identity’s secret to the grave.

For dramatic effect, Flavitsky bent history, turning myth into an indictment of state cruelty. Can great art justify a lie?

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