Dusi had briefly lived in Munich, Bavaria, where he had painted mainly portraits, but around 1840, the Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia, after visiting his Venetian studio, invited Dusi to St Petersburg.
Dusi decorate the ceiling of the Marinsky Theater and two curtains, both lost, one for the Bolshoi theater in Moscow, depicting Ilsolenne entrance of Prince Požorskij into Moscow, and the other, probably for the Alexandrine theater of St Petersburg in 1858.