Читать книгу Russian Painting - Peter Leek - Страница 10

In 1843 Briullov and a number of other artists, including Bruni, Markov, Basin, Chebouev and Timofeï were commissioned to decorate the interior of St. Isaac’s Cathedral in Saint Petersburg.

A Russian artist of French origin (his family had fled France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685) Briullov raised Russian painting to the European level. He introduced Romantic warmth along with inspiration from pompous classicism and reproduced living, spiritual and physical human beauty. From his home in Italy, where he lived until 1853, Briullov painted diverse subjects and explored various genres. Although antique and biblical subjects soon became less important, the largest murals of the St. Isaac Cathedral were entrusted to him: the cupola, the four Evangelists, the twelve Apostles and also the four large compositions from the New Testament. His depiction of the Virgin in Majesty, surrounded by saints and angels, fills the interior of the impressive central dome (a ceiling of over 800 square metres rimmed by gold stucco and white marble). Today, we still have sketches of these compositions as well as preliminary drawings based on models. The paintings of the Evangelists and the Apostles are reminiscent of his Siege of Pskov. The damp, cold and stone dust in the newly built cathedral undermined his health, and in 1847 he was compelled, reluctantly, to abandon the murals, which he had hoped would be the crowning glory of his artistic career.

Two other painters who produced major historical and religious works were Anton Losenko (1737–73) and Alexander Ivanov, whose father – Andreï Ivanov (see above) – was a professor of historical painting at the Academy. Losenko was born in a small town in the Ukraine and orphaned when young. After a course of singing lessons, he was sent to Saint Petersburg because of his remarkable voice. There, at the age of sixteen, he was entrusted to the care of Argunov (by that time one of the leading portraitists), then studied at the Academy, where he eventually became professor of history painting. Losenko’s artistic education was completed in Paris and Rome, and several of his religious works – such as The Miraculous Catch and Abraham’s Sacrifice – show the influence of Italian Renaissance painting. Curiously, his Cain (1768) and Abel (1769) were intended as exercises in life painting and were only given their Biblical names several decades after his death.

A contemporary of Briullov, Alexander Ivanov was indisputably the most influential religious painter of his day. After making his mark with pictures such as Apollo, Hyacinth and Zephyr and The Appearance of Christ to Mary Magdalene (1836), he embarked on The Appearance of Christ to the People, a huge canvas that was to occupy much of his energy for the next twenty years, from 1837 to the year before he died. Nevertheless, despite all those years of effort, Ivanov was never happy with the painting and never regarded it as finished. Indeed, it has an undeniably laboured quality, and many of his preparatory studies – landscapes, nature studies, nudes and portraits, including a head of John the Baptist that is masterpiece in its own right – have a vitality that is absent from the painting itself.

During the last decade of his life Ivanov produced more than 250 Biblical Sketches, many of them remarkable for their limpid colours and spiritual intensity. His great ambition was to convert these watercolour studies into murals for a temple that would encompass every aspect of human spirituality. This project, which drew on mythology, as well as Christian ideas, loomed so large in his imagination that he made endless excuses to avoid working on the interior of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, in order to concentrate on the ideal temple taking shape in his mind.

11. Nikolaï Gay, Calvary (Unfinished), 1893. Oil on canvas, 22.4 × 191.8 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

12. Ivan Kramskoï, Christ in the Desert, 1872. Oil on canvas, 180 × 120 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.