OF THE VARIOUS ARTS, sculpture offers the most vivid illustration of the rapid Westernization of Russian art in the course of the eighteenth century. Since images in the round traditionally were proscribed by the Orthodox church, sculpture was a relatively undeveloped art in Russia before the eighteenth century, although a limited amount of religious sculpture did exist.¹ Among the changes wrought in Russian life by Peter I was the importation of sculpture from Western Europe. Peter’s Summer Garden, laid out between 1706 and 1718, was lined with allegorical figures and busts of classical heroes commissioned in Italy by Russian ambassadors. In 1720 an antique Venus that had been unearthed two years before in Rome was placed in a special gallery near the river bank.² Peter is credited with having imported some three hundred marble statues during his reign.

The appearance of these elegantly draped, and undraped, figures on the chilly banks of the Neva gave rise to astonishment and in some cases to scandalized comment. Even today there is something incongruous about the exposure of nude marble figures to the harsh Russian climate. It is a measure of the success of state patronage and of the academic system, which was given definitive form under Catherine II, that by the end of the century sculpture had become an integral part of Russian art. Sculpture furnished the imperial residences and enlivened the façades of St. Petersburg buildings. The sculpted portrait, grave monument, and public statute were all well-established forms. The neoclassical style that swept Europe in the last third of the century found admirable practitioners in the Russian sculptors Fedor Gordeev, Fedosii Shchedrin, Mikhail Kozlovsky, and Ivan Martos.

Nearly all prominent Russian sculptors of the end of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century were products of the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg.³ As was the practice in European academies, all students at the Petersburg academy spent their first years of study drawing—first from engravings and then from the collection of casts that had been established at the academy in 1748.⁴ Only after a student’s taste had been formed through exposure to good examples of art was he allowed to work from life. Those students selected for training in sculpture proceeded toward their goal in a similar series of measured steps, first modeling simple ornamental motifs in relief, then progressing to the human figure (also in relief), and finally proceeding to sculpture in the round and to life models. Generally assignment to a particular division of the academy was at the choice of the student, unless places needed filling or other considerations intervened. Ivan Terebenev, for example, was transferred from painting to sculpture against his own wishes.⁵

A relief representing Sculpture (fig. 10.1) designed by Ivan Martos for the main stairway at the Academy of Arts illustrates the hierarchical method of study. The central figure, Sculpture herself, is seated with a chisel before a replica of the Belvedere torso; a fragment of the Laocoön rests on the floor. Youths and children at various stages of the sculptor’s education surround her—two are drawing, one modeling in relief, and two working in the round. By proceeding in these stages, with the antique sculpture always in view, the student gradually acquired the knowledge and skill that then enabled him to work from nature while preserving a vision of ideal form. Thus, the study of antiquity was, in academic practice, a means of understanding and assimilating universal principles of form, proportion, and harmony, which the diversity of nature might obscure.

For a successful student, the culmination of academic study was a sojourn in Rome as pensioner of the academy. Rome afforded various opportunities: work with skilled craftsmen, consultation with some of the leading figures in European art, and, above all, firsthand experience of ancient art. A report made in 1773 by Arkhip Ivanov and two other Russian pensioners in Rome expressed the necessity of study from the antique in terms that would have been familiar to artists of many other nationalities when working in Rome:

Formerly we thought, as did many others, that even without this [study from antique models] it is possible to attain perfection, having good precepts from a master and combining these with indefatigable efforts and constant study from nature. But now we see that we were very mistaken and that nature alone blinds us, being so various and containing so very much that is poor instead of that beauty which the antique so happily reveals to us in its works.⁶

Fledgling sculptors of all nationalities expressed the same feelings— the overwhelming awe inspired by the antique and the desire to master nature through the example provided in classical sculpture. The Swede Johann Tobias Sergei, who arrived in Rome in 1767, realized that “it was necessary to begin afresh, to study as a child being taught its basic principles. . . . Antiquity in the daytime and studies from life in the evening.”⁷ The Russian Mikhail Kozlovsky pursued a similar program of life-study classes and visits to museums. He diligently visited the Vatican, Capitoline Museum, Barberini Palace, Borghese Gallery, and other collections containing classical sculpture and some Renaissance and baroque works. A journal submitted by Kozlovsky to the Academy of Arts in 1776 details his activities in Rome.⁸ While Russian sculptors universally expressed praise for the antique, they frequently assumed an attitude of superiority toward contemporary Italian art. Kozlovsky noted in the concluding paragraphs of his report to the academy the weakness of contemporary Italian sculptors if compared with the antique. He remarked, too, that Rome was a “truly philosophical place” but undermined the elevated sentiment by adding that absence of available amusements enforced this condition.

In Europe as a whole belief in the antique as the most important guide to artistic perfection gathered force during the last third of the eighteenth century. Winckelmann’s Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griescheschen Werke appeared in 1755, followed by his Geschichte der Kunst des Altherthums in 1764. Joseph-Marie Vien, director of the French Academy in Rome between 1775 and 1781, likewise championed the cause of the antique to his students, among whom was the painter Jacques-Louis David. In England Charles Townley and William Weddel amassed collections of antique sculpture, and sculpture galleries were created at great houses like Newby Hall and Syon House. In the same years in Russia Catherine II acquired a considerable amount of antique sculpture, some from Gavin Hamilton, the artist-dealer who sold to Townley and Weddel. The Cavaliers’ Hall at Pavlovsk, created in 1798 by Vincenzo Brenna as a reception hall for the Knights of the Maltese Order, was conceived as a sculpture gallery housing antique works, principally Roman sculpture of the second and third centuries A.D., purchased by Catherine from an English collection.

At Tsarskoe Selo and Pavlovsk Catherine was an early patron of neoclassical architecture and sculpture. Charles Cameron decorated the Agate Pavilion at Tsarskoe Selo with low reliefs on the exterior, while the interior reception rooms contained sculpture by various masters and reliefs on mythological subjects by Dominique Rachette. Although an indifferent sculptor, Rachette, who was trained at the Copenhagen Academy of Art, has been credited with bringing the teachings of Winckelmann to Russia.⁹ At the Pavlovsk palace Ivan Martos headed a workshop, which produced a set of four reliefs, at least two of which were closely based on antique sources known to the sculptor through engravings.¹⁰ Paul I continued the direction of his mother’s artistic interests. In the 1880S a young sculptor, Fedor Gordeev, was commissioned to make copies of the Apollo Belvedere, the Farnese Hercules, and other famous works for Pavlovsk and Tsarskoe Selo; of these the Apollo was a specific request by Paul himself.

Sculpture galleries made their appearance not only at imperial residences but at various estates, for example the Italian Pavilion at Ostankino or the Antique Hall at Arkhangelskoe, which contained works excavated at Pompeii. The decorative sculpture of this period was marked by delicacy and refinement of taste. This is visible, for example, in the reliefs commissioned from Fedor Gordeev in the 1780s for the Sheremetev estate at Ostankino. Gordeev’s Marriage of Cupid and Psyche (fig. 10.2) has the elegance and cool purity of Wedgwood pottery. Possession of sculpture in the classical style was a badge of education, taste, and affluence; it signified membership in an international community of connoisseurs. Many works singled out for admiration by Russian patrons, for example the Farnese Hercules, were also proposed by Thomas Jefferson for an ideal sculpture gallery that he planned for Monticello around 1771.¹¹ In Russia a decision was made at the Academy of Arts in 1798 to make casts from antique sculpture available for sale to the public in order to disseminate “good taste.”¹²

The treatises on art that appeared in Russia at the close of the eighteenth century accepted as an established fact the virtues of antique art and the greatness of the Greek people, as extolled by Winckelmann.¹³ Winckelmann had cited the climate, morals, and social order of the Greeks as the conditions contributing to the greatness of their art. Russian treatises of the late eighteenth century frequently named freedom as a condition for the development of art and stressed at the same time that art reflected the grandeur of the state and the people that give it birth. According to Dmitrii Golitsyn, in a letter submitted to the Academy of Arts, despotism would inhibit the successful development of art, while enlightened monarchy would facilitate it. Following the lead of Diderot, Golitsyn and other writers argued, too, the power of art to educate and to raise the moral level of the viewer.¹⁴

Petr Chekalevsky’s Razsuzhdenie 0 svohodnykh khudozhestvakh s opisaniem nekotorykh proizvedenii Rossiskikh khudozhnikov, published in St. Petersburg in 1792, was by the author’s own admission simply a digest of foreign writings on the nature and function of art. The book contains long citations from Winckelmann—his descriptions of the Apollo Belvedere and the Laocoön. Other passages closely parallel the articles on painting and sculpture from the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert. According to Chekalevsky, art would be greatest when determined not by the caprices of an individual patron but by the will of an entire nation. The fine arts in general harness the forces of beauty in the service of truth and virtue. Nature’s beauty, acting on the senses, awakens both reason and feeling [razum i serdtse] Sculpture, which is probably the oldest of the arts, demands greater knowledge and sureness than painting because of the material difficulties it presents, most notably the impossibility of serious revision. Despite the difficulties of the medium, Chekalevsky offers the opinion that contemporary sculpture may have surpassed that of the ancients in refinement of taste, an achievement made possible by the development of reason and science in the modern age.¹⁵

The advent of the neoclassical style in Russia may be witnessed in the careers of Fedosii Shchedrin (1751-1825) and Mikhail Kozlovsky (1753-1802). Both represent a generation in uneasy transition from the baroque tendencies of the mid-eighteenth century to a more stringent classical simplicity of style. Shchedrin entered the Academy of Arts in 1764, Kozlovsky in 1766. Both appear in academy records in 1767 enrolled in the sculpture class of Nicolas Gillet, a French sculptor who had been brought to St. Petersburg a decade earlier. Finally, both spent time as pensioners abroad—Shchedrin in France, Kozlovsky in Rome. Their differing experience abroad determined the shape of their respective careers.

Shchedrin was sent abroad in 1773, but his career as a pensioner commenced inauspiciously. Ordered to Florence, he enrolled in the academy there. However, he found the Florentine academy disappointing and the local collections inhospitable to young artists. Shchedrin requested a transfer to Paris or—failing that—to Rome. As there was no immediate reply from St. Petersburg, the young sculptor took the advice of the Russian ambassador and proceeded to Rome, where he was to work for nearly a year until reassigned to Paris. Shchedrin then lingered in Paris for ten years, first as a pensioner, later supporting himself by commissions. While in Paris he studied at the French academy under the highly respected Christophe-Gabriel Allegrain and received awards and recognition from the French. During this time the free baroque style visible in Shchedrin’s struggling Marsyas (1776, Leningrad, Academy of Arts) gave way to the simpler and broader forms of his Sleeping Endymion (1779, Leningrad, Russian Museum).

Shchedrin took this Sleeping Endymion back to Russia in 1785, hoping the work would earn him the rank of academician, but it was not until 1794 that he was awarded academic rank, for his famous Venus (fig. 10.3). The similarity of Shchedrin’s Venus to the Venus Bathing (1767, Paris, Louvre) of his teacher Allegrain has been noted by more than one author. Although Shchedrin eliminated some of the prettiness and delicacy of Allegrain’s figure, many hints of a French orientation remained in the Russian sculptor’s work. His Diana (Leningrad, Russian Museum) or the closely related figure of the river Neva for the Grand Cascade at Peterhof possess a Gallic daintiness and charm. In later years the artist was awarded a number of public commissions: façade sculpture for Thomas de Thomon’s Bourse, reliefs for the Kazan Cathedral, and the large and impressive sea nymphs supporting globes outside the central block of the Admiralty. All these sculptural groups by Shchedrin are remarkable for gracefulness of line and a harmonious union of sculpture and architecture.

The career of Mikhail Kozlovsky initially took a different course. Kozlovsky’s time as a pensioner abroad was spent in Rome (1774-79). There, although he faithfully studied antique sculpture, the influence of Michelangelo was most immediately apparent in works like the Russian sculptor’s Shepherd with a Hare (fig. 10.4). Kozlovsky’s work may be compared, too, with that of his slightly older Swedish contemporary Sergei, who was in Rome during the 1770s. After leaving Rome in 1779, Kozlovsky briefly visited Paris and then, returning to Russia, he assumed a respected position in St. Petersburg art circles. Among his works are reliefs and architectural sculpture for Tsarskoe Selo, Pavlovsk, and other palaces. Kozlovsky’s Vigil of Alexander of Macedon was singled out for attention in Chekalevsky’s Razsuzhdenie 0 svohodnykh khudozhesvakh as one of the outstanding examples of Russian art.

In 1788 Kozlovsky was sent to Paris to supervise the remaining pensioners working there. Letters from Kozlovsky to the academy council drew attention to the painting of Jacques-Louis David, whom Kozlovsky cited as a desirable “example to all sculptors,” although Kozlovsky’s own art continued to partake of both baroque and classicizing tendencies. During his stay in France the artist witnessed the French Revolution of 1789. It has been suggested that Kozlovsky’s sculpture Polycrates (fig. 10.5), richly baroque in form, was in some measure a response to revolutionary events, since Polycrates had been identified by Diderot as a tyrant who, knowing no measure in greed and vanity, deserved death at the hands of jealous gods.¹⁶

Upon his return to Russia, Kozlovsky appears to have been received with some suspicion; yet in 1794 he, like Shchedrin, received the rank of academician. Among the various commissions that occupied him in the last years of his life were the monument to Suvorov in the Field of Mars (1799-1801) and the central group of Samson and the Lion on the Grand Cascade at Peterhof. Although his art inclines toward the classical ideal, Kozlovsky, like many of his French contemporaries at the end of the eighteenth century, defies any convenient division between neoclassicism and the baroque.

By contrast, Russian sculpture in the first decades of the nineteenth century reveals a thorough assimilation of neoclassical ideas by the succeeding generation of artists and close contacts between Russian sculptors and the international community in Rome. Fedor Tolstoi, Vice President of the Academy of Arts from 1828 until his death in 1873, exemplifies a firm commitment to neoclassicism. Even his apartments at the Academy of Arts were decorated in Greek style. With the aid of serf craftsmen Tolstoi constructed a rotunda with cupola, columns, and pseudoclassical furniture—including a magnificent bed that later appeared in the artist’s engraving of Psyche in her bedchamber.

Of aristocratic background, friendly with the Decembrists and close to Pushkin, Zhukovsky, and other prominent figures in the arts, Tolstoi was among the most learned and influential artists of his day. His medals of the Napoleonic Wars earned him international repute. One of these, severely simple and expressive in design, represents the Triple Alliance (fig. 10.6), conceived as a group of classical warriors joining their raised arms in an oath. In his writings Tolstoi advocated the study of Greek history and archeology so as to achieve verisimilitude in rendering armor, clothing, and other detail. To Tolstoi the decorative fantasies of rococo art were artificial or unnatural by contrast with the clarity and intelligibility of the classical style. He argued for elimination of excess ornament, that is, the overload of decorative motifs like cupids and garlands, from medals and relief sculpture. Indeed, Tolstoi considered it desirable that an observer be able to understand the identity and significance of the figures on a medal without recourse to explanatory inscriptions.¹⁷

In a similar vein of classical austerity, Samuil Galberg, who spent 1819 to 1821 in Rome as an academic pensioner, condemned the Italian sculptor Antonio Canova for producing work that was too much like a life study, full of mistakes derived from virtuoso imitation of nature. This opinion was shared by Winckelmann and by Quatremère de Quincy, who praised Canova’s Theseus (1804-19, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) precisely because it represented a conversion from the vulgarity of the artist’s earlier work to the simplicity of the beau idéal.¹⁸ Among contemporaries Galberg praised the Danish sculptor Berthel Thorvaldsen for the clarity, simplicity, and relieflike qualities of his sculpture—closer, Galberg claimed, to the antique ideal than was Canova’s illusionistic treatment of marble. While Galberg’s own sculpture has these same properties of clarity and simplicity, the slightly younger Russian sculptor Boris Orlovsky felt the influence of Thorvaldsen even more directly. During his years as a pensioner in Rome (1822-29), Orlovsky worked in Thorvaldsen’s studio, and later the two men carried on an extensive correspondence. Orlovsky’s Parts (fig. 10.7) closely approximates the deliberate simplicity and impersonality of Thorvaldsen’s Ganymede (1804, Copenhagen, Thorvaldsens Museum). These beautiful standing youths represent the neoclassical ideal at its purest.

That sculpture should manifest dignity, simplicity, and stillness was maintained by Galberg in a dispute with his patron, Prince I. A. Gagarin, over the appropriate pose for a Faun Hearing the Sound of a Reed Flute (1824, Leningrad, Russian Museum). Gagarin had suggested that the faun be shown drawing back in surprise from the first notes. Galberg objected that an effect of movement would be inappropriate and that a “middle” pose of quiet attention would be more “statuesque.”¹⁹ The simplicity thought to be a natural property of sculpture was urged on all the arts by Galberg’s contemporary, the sculptor Mikhail Krylov: “Painting, confounded and gazing with envy on the successes of sculpture, shamed by its advantages . . . demanded to replace the artificial style with a natural one whose principal quality is simplicity.”²⁰ In this statement, Krylov, like Fedor Tolstoi, claimed simplicity as the hallmark of naturalness, as opposed to the decorative excess of rococo.

While a certain degree of native talent and manual dexterity was deemed necessary for the sculptor, training and discipline were considered more important. Perfection could be attained through an education founded on universally valid principles, that is, through systematic study of both nature and the antique. The sculptor was expected to subordinate his personality to the ideal. Galberg praised Thorvaldsen’s sculpture for the effacement of the artist’s personality. Boris Orlovsky informed one of his students that he had achieved his own success “through labor and effort, not possessing any unusual talent.”²¹ The instructions received by Galberg from the academy before he set off for Rome recommended an attitude of humility. Not only was the young sculptor enjoined to comport himself in such a way as to bring credit on all Russians, but he was also advised to “bear always in mind that modesty in the judgment of one’s own capabilities and a proper respect for the talents of other artists is an appurtenance of outstanding gifts and inextricably bound up with true genius.”²²

The career of Ivan Martos (1754-1835) deserves special examination since it spans the rise and assimilation of neoclassicism in Russia. Martos was a major figure in the first generation of classicism, yet by the time of his death there had been significant challenge to the neoclassical ideal. Martos entered the Academy of Arts at the age of ten, at which time instruction in sculpture was under the direction of Nicolas Gillet. During the years Martos was a student, the rococo naturalism of Gillet’s style began, however, to pass out of favor, while ancient sculpture became the preferred model. In 1769 the collection of casts at the academy was enlarged, at the initiative of I. I. Shuvalov, and given a more prominent role in the curriculum. In the same year a number of academic pensioners studying in France were transferred to Rome and placed under the guidance of Shuvalov and of the antiquarian and dilettante Johann Friedrich Reiffenstein, who was, like Shuvalov, an admirer of Winckelmann.²³ Martos spent five years in Rome (1774-79) as pensioner of the Academy of Arts. During this time he made use, in his own words, “of the advice of several French pensioners and other good artists who show me this [service] out of friendship.”²⁴ Among those whom Martos encountered in Rome were Pompeo Battoni, who directed the nature class of the Capitoline Academy, Carlo Albacini, a connoisseur and restorer of antique sculpture, Anton Raphael Mengs, the eminent neoclassical painter, Joseph-Marie Vien, director of the French Academy in Rome (Vien expressed admiration for Martos’s work), and Berthel Thorwaldsen, in whose studio Martos worked for a time.

During his lifetime, however, Martos was more often compared to Canova than to Thorwaldsen; he was even nicknamed “the Russian Canova.” This reputation persisted to the end of the nineteenth century, when Martos was cited in Mrs. Julia A. Shedd’s Famous Sculptors and Sculpture as an artist whose “works are marked by nobleness of conception and life-like expression. . . . In the treatment of drapery he is regarded as superior even to Canova.”²⁵ Although the surfaces of Martos’s sculpture are generally less seductive than Canova’s, the delicate linear quality of his work justifies the comparison.

Upon his return to Russia in 1779 Martos was appointed a professor at the Academy of Arts, a post he held until his death in 1835. He also had a hand in the creation of sculptural decoration for Tsarskoe Selo, working in concert with Charles Cameron. For the imperial family and for various aristocratic patrons, Martos did a large number of portrait busts and grave monuments in a classical style. In contrast to the liveliness and naturalism of portraits by Fedor Shubin, the most eminent portrait sculptor of the mid-eighteenth century in Russia, Martos presented his sitters, for example N. I. Panin and wife (1780, Moscow, Tretiakov Gallery), in the sober guise of Roman patricians.²⁶

Among Martos’s grave monuments, one of the most beautiful is that for M. P. Sobakina (fig. 10.8). A flattened pyramid in delicate low relief bears a portrait medallion of the deceased, and below that two allegorical figures, a mourning woman and a winged genius with an extinguished torch, flank a rose-strewn sarcophagus. In refinement of both composition and execution, this work may be favorably compared with the European works in Russian collections—for example, Augustin Pajou’s relief Princess of Hesse-Homberg as Minerva (1761) in the collection of Catherine II—or with Jean-Antoine Houdon’s tombs for two members of the Golitsyn family in the Donskoi Monastery, Moscow (1774).

In the first decade of the nineteenth century Martos received a number of important public commissions. Most prominent of these was the monument to Minin and Pozharsky (fig. 10.9), heroes of the defense of Moscow against the Poles in 1612. The idea for the monument originated in 1803 with the Free Society of Lovers of Literature, Sciences, and the Arts. Martos enthusiastically began work on sketches and models, although the commission was not formally awarded him until 1809. According to a contemporary observer, Martos undertook the sculpture aware of the Greek and Roman custom of erecting statues to heroes, but he believed that Minin and Pozharsky had even surpassed the ancient heroes in stature.²⁷ This emphatic patriotism pervades much of the contemporary comment on the monument.

The costume and hairstyles of the two figures conceived by Martos represent a subtle blend of classical prototypes with discreetly deployed Russian details, such as the embroidery of the tunics. In the case of Minin, the source for the vigorously modeled head is an antique Jupiter, a copy of which appears at the far right in Martos’s relief on the art of Sculpture (fig. 10.1). The hairstyle, however, has been adjusted to resemble a Russian type. Minin, although not Pozharsky, wears trousers, which in classical art appeared only in works representing Scythians or other barbarian peoples. In an early model for the monument Pozharsky had a dramatically billowing cloak, and both figures gesticulated more freely. In the final version the billowing cloak disappeared and Minin’s figure was given a new degree of prominence, apparently to emphasize the role played by Minin, the “Russian Plebeian,” as opposed to the warrior-noble Pozharsky.²⁸ The monument was finally erected in Red Square in 1818, following the defeat of Napoleon. The dedication was attended by large crowds, who swarmed to the roof of the Gostinnyi Dvor and climbed the Kremlin towers in order to watch the ceremony.

Despite its enthusiastic reception, the monument did provoke some mildly satiric commentary. A popular print (fig. 10.10) shows members of different social classes gathered in front of it. Examining the enormous bulging figures, one of the lower-class men naively remarks on their size under the impression that the heroes themselves were equally enormous. His friend assures him that they were deliberately made larger than life “to show their great courage and great love for the Fatherland.”

While work on the monument to Minin and Pozharsky was in progress, Martos was forced to defend some of his other works from attack. In a letter written in 1813 to Petr Chekalevsky, Vice President of the Academy of Arts, Martos attempted to refute critics who objected that the proposed classical poses and near nudity of his sculpted evangelists for the Kazan Cathedral were not appropriate to the religious subject.²⁹ Martos marshaled various arguments concerning the symbolic importance of nudity in both pagan and Christian art and also appealed to a patriotic motive. He cited the extraordinary nature of recent events in Russia as the inspiration for a new, heroic style. In keeping with this heroic ideal, Martos based the attitudes and anatomy of the four evangelists on Michelangelo’s sculpture. He defended the nudity of his figures as more timeless than any possible clothing and as more worthy of the sculptor’s art. To depict the human body, the supreme accomplishment of nature, ‘‘woven by God’s fingers,” was a task that surpassed in Martos’s view the cold craftsmanship involved in sculpting drapery.

Not only did Martos defend the neoclassical ideal of sculptural beauty; he also held strongly the view that sculpture was a public art with a duty to inspire action and heroism. In writing about his works for the Kazan Cathedral—the evangelists and reliefs on Old Testament subjects—Martos explained that:

By means of his artifice he [the sculptor] has the opportunity to converse with all viewers in a secret hieroglyphic language reminding them of the circumstances, times, and persons contributing to the sculpture of a particular object. He has the exclusive right . . . not to dreamy, but to elevated ideas. . . . Through difficult bends of the human body the previously difficult situation of the beloved fatherland in the present war can be conveyed . . . and finally, in the general and harmonious composition of my groups every zealous Russian can with especial pleasure understand the expression of a decisive union of classes [soiuz gosudarstvennykh soslovii] manifesting an unshakable firmness.³⁰

The severe and heroic side of neoclassicism was most clearly revealed in works by artists like Tolstoi, Galberg, Orlovsky, and Martos. The functions of sculpture in this period were not, however, limited to the heroic ideal. There was, in addition, a more graceful and decorative side to the neoclassical style. Often the distinction between sculpture and the decorative arts was not clearly marked—for example, the graceful union of sculpture and architecture occuring in the caryatids, garden statuary, and sculpture-filled niches of various palaces and estates. In addition to the noble emotions singled out in theoretical discussions, there was a more sentimental side to early nineteenth-century sculpture. This is exemplified in Petr Sokolov’s Milkmaid with a Broken Jug (1807) for the park at Tsarskoe Selo. This sculpture was the subject of a poem by Alexander Pushkin, later set to music by Cesar Cui: “The maiden sits sadly holding the jug in vain. / A miracle! The water does not cease to pour from the broken urn. / Forever, the maiden sadly sits above the endless stream.”

9.1 Thomas de Thomon (1750s-1813)

9.2 Tver (now Kalinin) at the beginning of the twentieth century

9.3 Map of St. Petersburg, 1829

9.4 Moscow Kremlin Embankment about 1825

9.5 Karl Ivanovich Rossi (1755-1849)

9.6 The Alexander Column (Montferrand) and General Staff Arch (Rossi)

9.7 Red Square after the Fire of 1812

9.8 Bolshoi Theater (Osip Bove and A. A. Mikhailov)

10.1 Ivan Martos, Sculpture

10.2 Fedor Gordeev, Marriage of Cupid and Psyche

10.3 Fedosii Shchedrin, Venus

10.4 Mikhail Kozlovsky, Shepherd with a Hare

10.5 Mikhail Kozlovsky, Polycrates

10.6 Fedor Tolstoi, Triple Alliance

10.7 Boris Orlovsky, Paris

10.8 Ivan Martos, Grave Monument for M. P. Sobakina

10.9 Ivan Manos, Monument to Minin and Pozharsky

10.10 Russian popular point

10.11 Ivan Vitalii, Venus

10.12 Vasilii Demut-Malinovsky, Russian Scaevola

10.13 Perr Klodt, Monument to Nicholas I

10.14 Nikolai Pimenov, Youth Playing Knucklebones

10.15 Nikolai Pimenov, Boy Asking Alms

By the 1830s qualities of gracefulness and charm were more pronounced than in the earlier phases of neoclassicism. The Venus of Ivan Vitalii (fig. 10.11) is more openly sensuous in its appeal than Shchedrin’s Menus from 1792. During this period children appeared frequently as subjects: Nikolai Pimenov’s Boy Asking Alms, Petr Stavasser’s Boy Fishing (1839, Leningrad, Russian Museum), or Fedor Kamensky’s Young Sculptor (1866, Leningrad, Russian Museum). Finally, in certain works around mid-century a cloying degree of prettiness emerges, for example in Konstantin Klimchenko’s Girl with Mirror (1840s, Leningrad, Russian Museum).

The heroic aspect of sculpture was, on the other hand, emphatically maintained in monumental sculpture. A motif already depicted in a popular print by Ivan Terebenev, the “Russian Scaevola” (cf. Bowlt, fig. 12.2), took on an uncompromisingly heroic form when interpreted in sculpture by Demut-Malinovsky. Although the figure is provided with a Russian ax and an Orthodox cross, the nudity and the contrapposto pose of the sculptural version of the Russian Scaevola (fig. 10.12) are entirely classical in type. This work, which earned its author the rank of professor, is one of a number in the same period, for example Martos’s Minin and Pozharsky and Vitalii’s relief of the Liberation of Moscow (1829-30) for Osip Bove’s Triumphal Gates, which accommodated specifically Russian details within a classical context.

At mid-century a new degree of naturalism appeared. This is visible in Petr Klodt’s memorial to I. A. Krylov (1848-55) in the Summer Garden in St. Petersburg. The figure, cast in bronze, wears a nineteenth-century suit and is comfortably seated in an armchair. Indeed, with Klodt the neoclassical concept of form has largely lost its sway. Klodt’s equestrian monument to Nicholas I (fig. 10.13) represents the tsar not as a classical warrior but in the uniform of the Russian guard. The horse is modeled with the anatomical fidelity for which the sculptor was renowned, and in the narrative reliefs on the base of the monument, frock-coated figures celebrate the opening of the Petersburg-Moscow railway and other contemporary events, which are presented with a minimum of mythological or allegorical embellishment.

The monument to Nicholas I illustrates official taste, since Alexander II transmitted personal instructions and criticism to the artist through the council of the Academy of Arts. The first sketch of the monument, with a standing horse, was rejected as too pedestrian (perhaps the example of Klodt’s much-admired rearing horses for the Anichkov Bridge was still fresh in the emperor’s mind). Alexander remained dissatisfied even with the next-to-last variant and directed certain alterations: “to change the gait of the horse from left leg to right, to make the plume on the helmet smaller, to place the helmet farther back on the head, to make the boots softer, the epaulets and right sleeve fuller.”³¹

An interest in national subject matter was also gathering force. This occurred most strikingly in the 1830s, when three sculptors, Nikolai Pimenov, Alexander Loganovsky, and Anton Ivanov, each exhibited a work representing a youth playing a Russian game. Pimenov and Loganovsky, both students at the Academy of Arts, exhibited together in 1836. The latter’s Boy Playing Nail and Ring (Leningrad, Russian Museum) is closely based, in its pose and its anatomical detail, on the Borghese Warrior, an important Hellenistic work of which there was a cast in the academy collection.³² In spite of the obvious derivation of Loganovsky’s figure and Pimenov’s Youth Playing Knucklebones (fig. 10.14) from classical athletes and warriors, the impact of the Russian subjects was sufficient to move Alexander Pushkin, visiting the exhibition, to exclaim: “Thank Heaven, finally even sculpture in Russia has become native [narodnaia]” and to compose a brief poem on each of the two works. Further, both Pimenov and Loganovsky received large gold medals for their pieces, an unusual doubling of the award. The popularity of the new subject matter is also attested by the fact that in 1838 copies of the two works, in cast iron, were placed outside the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo.³³

Nikolai Pimenov’s career offers an illustration of various tendencies that prevailed around the middle of the century: nationalism, naturalism, and also renewed interest in Byzantine art. Son of the well-known academic sculptor Stepan Pimenov, Pimenov the younger, as he was called, entered the Academy of Arts in 1825. After studying in the studio of Galberg and earning a gold medal for Youth Playing Knucklebones, he spent the years 1837 to 1850 abroad, mostly in Italy. In Rome Pimenov’s Boy Asking Alms (fig. 10.15) attracted the favorable attention of the painter Alexander Ivanov and, dispatched to St. Petersburg, earned him the rank of academician.

Among other works of Pimenov’s Roman period is a small statue of a young man (1844, Leningrad, Russian Museum), probably a portrait of a fellow artist. The seated figure has almost nothing classical about it. It is clad in trousers and coat, nonchalant in pose. Even the base is not the conventional plinth but is scored to represent a floor. This burgeoning naturalism bore only minor fruit in Pimenov’s own art, but Pimenov became the teacher of two younger artists, Matvei Chizhov and Mark Antokolsky, who introduced a strong realist tendency into Russian sculpture.

Pimenov also received a number of commissions for religious sculpture. Works like his Triumph over the Waters and St. George (1854-55) are part of a general revival of Byzantine iconography and compositional types. In 1859, during one of the periodic reorganizations of the Academy of Arts, a division of Byzantine art was established in order to serve the needs of the church building campaigns initiated under Nicholas I, in particular the colossal St. Isaac’s Cathedral. Thus, by the middle of the century, both an increasing naturalism and the demands of religious art had thoroughly undermined the preeminence of the neoclassical style.

Further, with the rise of romanticism, sculpture gradually lost the central place that it had occupied among the arts. For the academic theoretician at the end of the eighteenth century, sculpture, as the most perfect achievement of ancient art, played a major role in the artist’s education. Sculpture was believed to demand the utmost degree of discipline and skill, even surpassing painting in this respect. While the sculpture division of the Academy of Arts lost students in the 1830s, it was still a powerful force within the academy, fighting to maintain the predominance of traditional academic principles.³⁴ Yet comparisons between the arts made by literary figures writing in the 1820s and 1830s, reveal that sculpture had lost its central position. According to the poet Dmitrii Venevitinov, writing in 1827, sculpture could claim an honorable place as the oldest of all the arts; sculpture was as fundamental to art as mountains and valleys are to nature. However, for Venevitinov sculpture lacked the sense of life and movement that may be successfully conveyed in painting and music.

Gogol’s essay “Sculpture, Painting, Music” (1831) characterized sculpture as the perfect reflection of the pagan ideal but an unsuitable art form for a Christian people. Sculpture could not provide “those mysterious, limitless sensations which awaken endless reverie.” Nikolai Stankevich in “Three Artists” entirely omitted sculpture from consideration. The favored arts were poetry, painting, and music. The sensations conveyed by each are those unattainable by sculpture: a sunset, a face in shadow, a distant castle—all these experiences produce an inexpressible emotion that brings tears to the eyes of the three brother artists of the essay.³⁵ In the romantic period there was little sympathy for an art predicated on diligence, restraint, and imitation of the past. The most drastic condemnation of sculpture was pronounced by the French poet Charles Baudelaire in his essay “Why Sculpture is Boring” (Salon 0f 1846). To Baudelaire, sculpture suffered not only from its burden of classicizing conventions but from the excessive literalness demanded by its brute three-dimensional material.

The changes that took place in Russian sculpture in the course of the nineteenth century paralleled those which occurred in painting, although sculpture remained on the whole more closely bound to past models than did painting—a situation that prevailed in Western Europe as well. Yet as one passes in review Russian sculpture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a considerable diversity does emerge, in spite of the rigid boundaries within which the artists operated. Few could deny the beauty of the grave monuments by Ivan Martos or the grandeur of the Alexander Column with its triumphant angel by Boris Orlovsky. Perhaps the most appealing aspect of sculpture in this period is its integration into a natural or architectural setting. Sculpture provided a focal point in urban spaces and, as the poetry of Pushkin attests, a human presence and an opportunity for reflection in the wooded parks of Pavlovsk and Tsarskoe Selo. As part of these settings neoclassical sculpture remains a vital feature of the Russian landscape.

NOTES

1. See N.E. Mneva et al., “Rez’ba i skul’ptura XVII veka,” in Istoriia russkogo iskusstva, ed. Igor Grabar’ et al., 13 vols. (Moscow, 1953-68), 4: 305-42. Also N. Vrangel’, Istoriia skul’ptury, in the incomplete Istoriia russkogo iskusstva, ed. Igor Grabar’ (Moscow, 1909-13), 5: 9-36 (hereafter cited as Vrangel’, Istoriia skul’ptury).

2. The so-called Tauride Venus was presented by Catherine II to Grigorii Potemkin and is now in the Hermitage. The statue was originally purchased by Iurii Kologrivov, supervisor of a group of Russian artists in Rome. Because of the prohibition on export of antiquities imposed by Pope Clement XI, Kologrivov had to appeal to Peter, who arranged to exchange the remains of St. Birgitta for the Venus: Iu. G. Shapiro, Ermitazh i ego shedevry (Leningrad, 1973), PP. 35-37. On the Summer Garden and Peter’s importation of sculpture, see G. M. Presnov, “Skul’ptura pervoi poloviny XVIII veka,” Istoriia russkogo iskusstva, 5: 438-39.

3. A few sculptors like Ivan Vitalii received their training by working for the stonecutting firm of Augustin Triskorni in Moscow and by assisting established artists on public monuments. However, the more ambitious of these went on to study at the Academy of Arts.

4. Diderot, on a visit to the Russian Academy in 1773, remarked on the absence of a large-scale anatomical model but praised the collection of casts. N. Moleva and E. Beliutin, Pedagogickeskaia sistema Akademii Khudozestv XVIII veka (Moscow, 1956), pp. 296-324. See p. 388, n. 12 for a list of the casts in the academy collection.

5. A. L. Kaganovich and V. M. Rogachevskii, “Skul’pturnyi klass Akademii Khudozhestv v XVIII veke,” in Akademiia Khudozhestv SSSR. Voprosy khudozhestvennogo obrazovaniia, Vypusk VI (Leningrad, 1973), pp. 39-68. Vypusk VII (1973) and VIII (1974) contain articles by the same authors on the sculpture class in the nineteenth century.

6. Mastera iskusstva ob iskusstve, ed. A. A. Guber, A. A. Fedorov-Davydov, et al., 7 vols. (Moscow, 1970), 6: III.

7. Dyveke Helsted, “Sergei and Thorvaldsen,” in The Age of Neo-Classicism, ex. cat. (The Royal Academy and The Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 1972), p. lxxxiv.

8. Mastera iskusstva ob iskusstve, 6:98-101.

9. Vrangel’, Istorila skul’ptury, p. 134. Rachette received his training at the Copenhagen Academy and later in Paris under Vien. He was invited to Russia in 1779 and eventually became a professor at the Academy of Arts.

10. E. V. Korolev, “Chetyre barel’efa raboty I. P. Martosa i ego masterskoi v pavlovskom dvortse,” in Pamiatniki kul’tury: Novye otkrytiia. Ezhegodnik 1978 (Leningrad, 1979). PP. 347-54.

11. Seymour Howard, “Thomas Jefferson’s Art Gallery for Monticello,” Art Bulletin 59 (1977): 583-99.

12. Kaganovich and Rogachevskii, “Skul’pturnyi klass Akademii Khudozhestv v XVIII veke,” p. 61.

13. I. F. Uranov, Kratkoe rukovodstvo k poznaniiu risovaniia i zhivopisi istoricheskogo roda, osnovannoe na umozrenii i opytakh (St. Petersburg, 1973); P. P. Chekalevskii, Razsuzhdenie 0 svobodnykh khudozhestvakh (St. Petersburg, 1789). Perhaps the frankest acknowledgment of the authority of the antique was Anton Losenko’s “Obiasneniie kratkoe proportsii cheloveka, obosnovannoe na dostovernom issledovanii raznykh proportsii drevnikh statui,” which advocated the measurement of antique sculpture in order to arrive at a perfect standard of proportion for the human body.

14. Moleva and Beliutin, Pedagogicheskaia sistema Akademii Khudozhestv XVIII veka, p. 72. As an acquaintance of Diderot’s, Golitsyn not surprisingly placed major emphasis on the study of nature as well as the antique.

15. For specific comments on the art of sculpture, including a list of the best classical examples, see Chekalevskii, Razsuzhdenie, pp. 39-60.

16. V. N. Petrov, “M. I. Kozlovskii,” in Istorila russkogo iskusstva, 6: 421.

17. After exhibition of the series of twenty medals, Tolstoi was elected to all the major academies of Western Europe. An offer from the British crown to purchase the medals (with supplementary designs depicting England’s role) was refused by the artist: Elena Mroz, Fedor Petrovich Tolstoi (Moscow-Leningrad, 1946), and E. V. Kuznetsova, Fedor Petrovich Tolstoi (Moscow, 1977). For Tolstoi’s opinions on art, see Mastera iskusstva ob iskusstve, 6: 217-21, and N. Moleva and E. Beliutin, Russkaia khudozhestvennaia shkola pervoi poloviny XIX veka (Moscow, 1963), p. 163.

18. Gerard Hubert, “Early Neo-Classical Sculpture in France and Italy,” in The Age of Neo-Classicism, p. lxxxii.

19. Skul’ptor S. I. Galberg v ego zagranichnykh pismakh i zapiskakh 1818-28, ed. V. Eval’d (St. Petersburg, 1884), pp. 146-47. Galberg’s “quiet” conception of the faun may have been inspired, at least in part, by the Italian sculptor Pietro Tenerani’s Faun Sounding a Pipe (1823). Galberg knew and admired Tenerani’s Psyche Abandoned, having singled this out as the only worthwhile thing at an exhibition of sculpture in Rome in the summer of 1818 (Ibid., p. 97). Tenerani’s Faun is illustrated in Oreste Raggi, Pietro Tenerani (Florence, 1880).

20. Moleva and Beliutin, Russkaia khudozhestvennaia shkola, p. 144.

21. Russkoe iskusstvo; Ocherki o zhizni i tvorchestve khudozhnikov pervoi poloviny XIX veka, ed. A. I. Leonov (Moscow, 1954), p. 380 (hereafter cited as Ocherki).

22. Elena Mroz, Samuil Ivanovich Gal’berg (Moscow-Leningrad, 1948), p. 4.

23. J. F. Reiffenstein (1719-1793) was an antiquarian and a dilettante in various fields of art. He served both the Russian and Saxon courts as privy councillor supervising artist-pensioners studying in Rome.

24. Vrangel’, Istoriia skul’ptury, p. 162. Joseph-Marie Vien, director of the French Academy in Rome, had a considerable reputation and was extended an invitation to come to Russia. Vien’s most famous pupil, Jacques-Louis David, was in Rome concurrently with Martos. On the French Academy under Vien, see Henry Lapauze, Histoire de l’Académie de France a Rome, 2 vols, (Paris, 1924), 1: 348-81.

25. Mrs. Julia A. Shedd, Famous Sculptors and Sculpture, rev. ed. (Boston-New York, 1886), p. 227.

26. Shubin did, upon occasion, adopt a more classicizing form for his busts, for example in his portrait of F. N. Golitsyn from the 1770s, but without the impression of weight and massiveness that characterizes Martos’s portraits of the Panins.

27. H. Storch, Russland unter Alexander dem Ersten (St. Petersburg, 1805), 5, pt. 8: 142-43. The section concerning Martos first appeared in serial form in October 1804. Cited by N. N. Kovalenskaia, T. V. Alekseeva, and V. N. Petrov, “I. P. Martos,” in Istoriia russkogo iskusstva, 8, pt. 1: 300.

28. A distinction between the roles of Minin and Pozharsky was made by Semon Bobrov in 1806 in the periodical Litsei, published by the Free Society of Lovers of Literature, Sciences, and the Arts: see Kovalenskaia, Alekseeva, and Petrov, “I. P. Martos,” p. 302.

29. Mastera iskusstva ob iskusstve, 6: 175-79.

30. Ibid., p. 178.

31. Ocherki, p. 469.

32. A drawing from this cast by A. P. Briullov in 1812 is illustrated by Moleva and Beliutin, Russkaia khudozhestvennaia shkola, plate 3.

33. Ocherki, pp. 441-42.

34. Moleva and Beliutin, Russkaia khudozhestvennaia shkola, p. 296.

35. D. Venevitinov, “Skul’ptura, zhivopis’ i muzyka,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow-Leningrad, 1934), pp. 127-30. N. V. Gogol’, “Skul’ptura, zhivopis’ i muzyka,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 11 vols. (Leningrad, 1952), 8: 9-12. N. Stankevich, “Tri khudozhnika,” in Stikhotvoreniia, tragediia, proza (Moscow, 1890), pp. 174-75. The existence of these essays was brought to my attention by James Billington’s The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York, 1966).