The author traces changes in the structure of scientific knowledge in the eighteenth century with reference to the Academy of Arts and Sciences founded by the Decree of the Senate on January 28 (February 8 (Old Style)), 1724 in St. Petersburg. The article demonstrates that the stable formula of “sciences and arts” was the main principle of scientific knowledge structure in the eighteenth century linking science and practice, science and technology, which implied a special place of craft knowledge and workshop as experimental production space. The art chambers in the Academy turned into experimental laboratories of their time, where experimental applied science took place playing a decisive role in the future industrial revolution. The combination of fundamental (theory and experiment) and applied (practice and new technology) science was extremely important not only for the development of science, but also for the entire economy. The personality of Peter the Great with his predilection for “sciences and arts” combined the qualities necessary to implement the idea of developing the sciences with the help of crafts, as well as crafts with the help of sciences,i. e., developing the economy with the help of sciences and technology. The results of the study demonstrate that a unique (secular) identity of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the spirit of the early Enlightenment came into being. It was necessary for the development of modern science, free from the influence of theology and the church. The accomplished diversification of the traditional narrative makes it possible to overcome the paradigm of the “modernizing” approach as applied to the concepts of science and craft. The chronological framework of the article is limited to 1725-1803, i. e. the time when the Academy of Sciences and Arts and from 1747, the Imperial Academy of Sciences and Arts existed, after which it was renamed as the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg, where “arts” was no longer present in the name, but continued to exist in a curtailed form in the structure of the Academy.