The Monument to Peter I (Russian: памятник Петру I) is a bronze equestrian monument of Peter the Great in front of the St. Michael's Castle in Saint Petersburg, Russia. In 1716, emperor Peter the Great commissioned the Italian sculptor Carlo Bartolomeo Rastrelli to design an equestrian statue in commemoration of the Russian victories over Sweden in the Great Northern War. Rastrelli worked for eight years with a model of the monument before it was approved by the emperor in 1724. But as the emperor died the following year, work halted and the sculpture's casting was only completed after the sculptor's death, by 1747, only to remain in a local warehouse, and not to be erected until 53 years later. In the meantime, Catherine the Great had ordered another monument in memory of her predecessor