Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia by Stites Richard

Author:Stites, Richard [Stites, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300128185
Publisher: YaleUP
Published: 2005-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

Of Gods and Heroes

What kind of art did students and professors produce for Russia? A fixed feature of the early Russian intelligentsia was their exposure to foreign ideas through reading imported materials and extended visits to Europe, especially the German university towns. Upon their descent from the exalted climes of Kant, Schelling, and Hegel and their return to Russia, the men of this generation virtually invented the main currents of Russian intellectual history. The esthetic parallel emanating from Russians in Rome has captured much less attention. Rome, because of its classical and Renaissance traditions, its landscape and light, had long before 1800 become a Mecca for European artists and creative people. The artistic road to Rome opened in seventeenth-century France and its status as cultural center achieved mythic proportions from the writings of Europeans who visited or lived there, such as Winckelmann, Goethe, and Byron, to name only a few. The aura of the Eternal City was enhanced by Mme. de Staël's popular Corinne, based on an 1807 tour. The novel is soaked in an atmosphere of art, architecture, ancient streets, historical figures, and active painters and sculptors such as Antonio Canova. The Russian Academy of Arts chose Italy as its principal source of artistic standards and it maintained regular contact with Rome from the late eighteenth century onward. Generations of creative Russian figures—painters and sculptors in particular—were shaped in the cultural crucible on the Tiber River.39

Aside from the few artists rich enough to finance their sojourns, the three roads to Rome for Russian students began with private patrons or owners; the Society for the Encouragement of Artists, a sponsoring organization; and, for most, an Academy pensionate. Awardees were assigned to a prominent local advisor, such as Vincenzo Camuccini or the Dane Berthel Thorwaldsen. Fëdor Matveev (1758-1826), the first Russian artist to take up regular residence in Italy, died there. F. Ya. Alexeev (1753-1824) gained fame by applying the techniques of the much-admired Canaletto’s Venetian waterscapes to the Neva. A golden age opened with Orest Kiprensky (1783-1836) who lived in Rome from 1816 to 1822. Silvestr Shchedrin, arriving in 1818, become intoxicated with Italy. Then came Fëdor Bruni, Bryullov, and—eventually the most famous of all—Alexander Ivanov. In the salons of expatriates such as Zinaida Volkonskaya artists mixed with other creative figures. Almost all the painters executed landscapes and cityscapes in and around Rome and sometimes Venice and Naples. Although the usual pensionate was three years, starting in the 1820s some Russian artists remained a decade or more, steeping themselves in antiquity and the Renaissance. For them, Italy was a museum of the fine arts, the mammoth original of the reproductions they had studied in back on the Neva.40

One of the earliest Russian photographers, Sergei Levitsky, in 1845 took a group picture of the Russian art colony in Rome, Nikolai Gogol among them, wearing wide-awake hats, voluminous cloaks, walking sticks, and other paraphernalia of the era’s romantic poses. The photo clearly suggests an atmosphere of bohemianism and emigré abandon that Russian artists at home did not possess.

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