IT IS SOMETIMES forgotten that Italy, not France, was the international center for artists and patrons during much of the early nineteenth century, and it is with Italy that I shall be concerned in discussing some relationships between Russian and European art. Almost all Russian artists from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth had either direct or indirect contact with the international artistic circle in Italy, and their interests were many. Rather than to speak in general terms, I have chosen to look at just a few artists, each of whom related rather differently to the art and artists—and nonRussian environment—with which he had contact. This chapter is meant as an introduction to a very complicated but fascinating subject.

When the concept of Western painting was embraced by Russian painters in the eighteenth century, the models were almost wholly contemporary French. With the establishment of the academy of art in St. Petersburg in 1757, however, Russian art took its place in the new movement spreading through Europe that insisted on more exacting training for artists and on greater intellectual discipline in the formulation of works of art. Like the academies being formed or reformed elsewhere at the time, the St. Petersburg Academy based its teaching on sixteenth-century Italian theories and it drew its models from the same selection of ancient sculpture and Italian Renaissance painters as used elsewhere. With a kind of militant insistence, the young Russian painter was brought abreast of the modern academic movement with its strong classical bias and made to become fluent in the lingua franca of international art. Not only style but subject matter followed the revived interest in antique themes, and even when subjects from national history were chosen, the incident—as in England, France, and eventually America—was given the heroic detachment provided by reference to traditions of which, as in America, the painters had only recently become a part.

6.1 Vladimir L, Borovikovsky, Portrait of Mariia I, Lopukhina (detail)

6.2 Orest Kiprensky, Portrait of Princess sof’is Shcherbatova

6.3 Karl Pavlovich Briullov, The Last Day of Pompeii

6.4 Aleksandr A. Ivanov, The Appearance of Christ to the People

6.5 Pavel A. Fedotov, Encore, Encore!

6.6 Vasilii A. Tropinin, Self-Portrait aganinst a View of the Kremlin

6.7 Aleksei Gavrilovich Venetsianov, Spring. Ploughing

6.8 Ivan I. Shishkin, Pine Forest in Viatsk Province

6.9 Ilia E. Repin, The Volga Boathaulers

6.10 Nikolai Ge, Golgotha

6.11 Vasilii V. Vereshchagin, The Apotheosis of War

6.12 Konstantin A. Korovin, Paris Café

6.13 Isaak Levitan, Fresh Wind, The River Volga

6.14 Valentin Serov, Portrait of E. S. Morozova, Wife of the Collector Ivan Morozov

6.15 Arkhip Kuindzhi, The Birch Grove

6.16 Mikhail Vrubel, The Prophet (detail)

7.1 Fedor M. Matveev, The Waterfall of Caduta delle Marmore on the River Velino

7.2 François Marius Granet, Interior view of the choir in the Capuchin Church in Piazza Barberini, Rome

7.3 Aleksandr Gavrilovich Denisov, Sailors at a Cobbler’s

7.4 Lavr K. Plakhov, Coachmen’s Room in the Academy of Arts

7.5 Silvestr F. Shchedrin, Fishermen on the Shore

7.6 Aleksandr A. Ivanov, Old Man Leaning on a Stick together with a Boy

8.1 Pavel A. Fedotov, A Choosy Bride

8.2 Vasilii G. Perov, Easter Procession in the Country

8.3 Ilia E. Repin, The Protodiakon

8.4 Vasilii I. Surikov, Boiarynia Morozova

8.5 Vasilii I. Surikov, The Storming of the Snow Town

Academic practice was based on systematic, step-by-step learning and on the principle that a work of art was a rhetorical construction based on an established vocabulary of forms. Like a proper child of the Enlightenment, the new academy emphasized the scrupulous study of phenomena, whether nature to be seen or passions to be felt, but looked upon the procedure only as preparation for intellectual formulation. Spontaneity and simple vision were as foreign to a finished work of art as infantile prattling was to poetry.

It seems somewhat ironical that, as the interest in the study of the shifting phenomena of nature increased during the last decades of the eighteenth century, the intellectual formulations of high art, as defined by the popular writings of Winckelmann and Mengs or the discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds in England, became more rigid. The distinction between observation and construction—seeing and intellectually doing—was emphatically stated, and artistic value was assumed to be derived wholly from the latter. Russian painters, sculptors, and artisans proved themselves no less capable than others of abiding by the classical rule of taste. Only in portraiture, where observation and styleconscious construction had of necessity to come to terms with each other, was the personal vision of the artist allowed to intrude, and it was in portraiture that Russian painters first showed a vitality of their own. The new academic discipline, in fact, helped painters such as Vladimir Borovikovsky (1758-1826) win their way from the elegant but superficial French facility, popular just after mid-century, to the sometimes harsh but tangible likenesses that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, discovered truth in individuality of character, making possible the emergence of so remarkable a portraitist as Orest Kiprensky (1783-1836), who divided his mature years between Russia and Italy. The seemingly strange opposition between the impersonal, remote aspect of the obligatory historical pieces and the lively particularization in portraiture was not peculiar to Russia; a similar dichotomy occurred in the work of so eminent a historical painter as Jacques Louis David, the American Benjamin West, and the Italian classicist Vincenzo Camuccini. It was a mark of the time.

Little by little, what had been considered only the means to an artistic end—the exact study of nature in all its changing aspects—began to assume what many cautious critics considered to be an undue importance in the artists’ preoccupations. To study nature gradually threatened to become more important than to create the ultimate work of art. And to study nature Russian artists began to join their European colleagues in traveling to Italy. Rome and Naples usefully provided the two qualities the artists required: the monuments of past tradition with their rich historical aura, familiar to all artists from their common academic training, and a beneficent nature that delighted the inquiring eye and satisfied the unhistorical urge to observe nature anew. To look at nature in Italy, where the landscape had been peopled by the ancients and painted by Poussin and Claude, was to make personal, direct contact with that heretofore remote tradition that the academy taught. It is not surprising that the artists who were the most avid seekers after this historical nature were often those from cultures that were deliberately making an effort to acquire a classical past, for example, artists from Scandinavia, Germany, America, and Russia.

In 1781 the twenty-three-year-old Russian painter Fedor Matveev (1758-1826) traveled to Rome, there to study landscape painting with the German painter Phillip Hackert, who had settled there in 1768. He spent the rest of his life in Rome, becoming famous among collectors for his views of the city and its historical environs. That he should have chosen to study with Hackert is as worthy of note as the fact that he was drawn to the painting of landscape (fig. 7.1). Strictly speaking, landscape in the 1780s was usually thought of as the pictorial assembly of natural objects in such a way as to create an environment that would provoke the imagination and delight the eye with its ideal beauty or picturesque form. Although Hackert was not insensible to the powers of compositional form, he was far more drawn to the complexities of visual fact. Like other painters in Rome in the 1770s and 1780s, he studied continually out of doors, but his studies led not to Claudian effusions or histrionic compositions in the manner of Rosa, but to large paintings that remained no less factual than his studies. One critic in 1785 wrote of his work that he introduced “all of the beauties of which he was capable without betraying truth. To extricate oneself from such an intricate labyrinth,” said the writer, “is conceded only to one who, as he, has made the most assiduous and sensitive studies from nature.” He remarked as well that it was very difficult for painters “when they have to paint a determined place with fidelity without the fantasy’s being allowed to add any beauty whatever or correct any defect.”¹

As a follower of Hackert, Matveev was one of the first of the Russian painters to take advantage of the international artistic circle in Italy to free himself, albeit timidly, from the strictures of an art of academic construction. After twenty-five years in Rome he was looked upon by the international colony as a venerable force in upholding the concept of truth to nature in his Roman views. In 1806, the year in which the American Washington Allston was painting his classical landscapes in Rome, a commentator remarking on paintings commissioned from Matveev by Lord Bristol, Count Demidov, and the Empress Mother of Russia, suggested that his view of Mount Cenis “should be considered a portrait, except for certain small incidental changes insisted on by the patron.”² By using the term portrait the critic surely meant that attention was drawn to the nature painted, rather than to the structure or to the emotion supplied by the artist. As one critic said in speaking of Hackert (1785), “a young artist must first learn to imitate nature’s parts, then learn to compose, and when his composition is mistaken for nature itself then he has arrived at Hackert’s goal.”³

An important key to this kind of painting, in which art became nature rather than a projection of human intellect, was the evocation of light. To painters from the north, the brilliant yet warm Meditteranean sun was in itself a fascination. Many preferred to see the sun through the eyes of Claude Lorrain, as a lodestone drawing the viewer into the magical depths of the painting. But some simply reveled in its pervasive brilliance and clarity. With a seemingly classical relentlessness, the southern sun singled out each shape to resound in a luminous space. Captured in painting, it swept away the shadows of tradition to focus the eye on the pleasures of actual vision. The paintings made in Rome by the Danish painter Christof Wilhelm Eckersberg (1783-1853), the Austrian Josef Rebell (1787-1827), the Italian Gianbattista Bassi, (1784-1852), and others before 1820 might depict traditional monuments, but their true theme was the awareness of sight and the untransformed beauties of the visual world.⁴ Their compositions, although as well defined as in a classical landscape, seem to have been perceived, not fabricated. They belong to nature rather than the mind of the artist, as if nature herself—or at least perception of it—had become rational. Thinking and seeing had become one.

This Roman vision traveled far. In 1818 Rome was alive with talk about a new painting shown by a Frenchman who had been resident there for some years. François Marius Granet (1775-1849), who had begun many years before to specialize in interiors,⁵ exhibited in that year a large painting evoking the quiet, light-filled space of the choir in the Capuchin church on Piazza Barberini (fig. 7.2). The sense of radiating light was such that a skeptical cardinal had to examine the back of the painting to make sure it was not produced by a trick.⁶ The illusion was only part of its impact, however; it advertised that art could be an extension of the normal environment, exploiting the sense, and still offer a content meaningful to the mind. If the construction were perfect, moreover, the artist might withdraw from his work, joining the viewer as an observer. The work stood beyond either rhetorical construction or self-expression, to serve instead as an object of quiet contemplation, a model with which to curb the waywardness of sight.

Granet was forced to make many replicas of the popular painting, which found their way to various parts of the world. In the United States, Thomas Sully made a copy that was widely exhibited, and one of Granet’s versions found its way in 1820 to Russia, where it remains. It was seen there by a remarkable painter who found in just this kind of quiet observation a satisfying link between his concern for art as an elevating tradition and his devotion to the simple world around him.

Aleksei Venetsianov (1779-1845) was trained in the usual academic procedures. Although he never traveled outside Russia, Venetsianov was thoroughly familiar with antique models and with the paintings of Claude, Poussin, and their Italian predecessors. He was also familiar with St. Petersburg types and the peasants of the countryside and enjoyed rendering their likenesses, sometimes in caricature. There is no hint of caricature and little of genre in the paintings he produced after 1820. His peasants, isolated in the fields or passively seated in strangely deep interiors, exist in a world no less perfect than that of a heroic landscape, yet in detail it is the material world of his own farm. The critical factor is the effect of pervasive light that seems to articulate each form, no matter how humble the object, in such a way as to give it voice in an artistic harmony. Venetsianov’s artistic goals were not untraditional: he was building a poetic harmony of forms. His revolution lay in his becoming aware that the classical goal could be reached effectively within the vocabulary of his own observation, that Russian fields and homely circumstances could, indeed, be seen as art. The trained artist’s powers to discern artistically relevant form was the basis of art, not the perpetuation of an external style and subject matter from the past. Like Granet with his monks, he chose his subjects from a realm far from that of his academic models, so that the transformation of the familiar objects in the measured beauty of the work was all the more patent. Seemingly without a change of form, the humbly local became the timeless universal.

Venetsianov’s paintings of luminous silence taught others to see the fields and forests and rude serfs as elements of an idyllic, contemplative harmony. The most sensitive of his followers was Grigorii Vasilievich Soroka (1823-64), who carried the thoughtful but sunny perceptions of Venetsianov into more somber realms. Fascination with complex reflected light in tightly bound interiors did not, however, become solely the expression of idyllic detachment. Aleksandr Gavrilovich Denisov’s painting of Sailors at a Cobbler’s (1832; fig. 7.3) is a case in point.⁷ The subject is a simple, everyday occurrence. Yet even here, the light, seeming to radiate from within the painting and yet to be contained within its boundaries, freezes the action at a compositionally perfect moment. The quiet of art is suddenly sensed in a thoroughly mundane situation. And that is true as well in Plakhov’s Coachmen’s Room in the Academy of Arts (1834; fig. 7.4), in which, by way of a Granet-like vaulted grotto, art—certainly with deliberate irony—is found not in the studio of classical casts but in the least art-conscious part of the building.⁸

While Venetsianov in Russia was exploring the artistically transforming effect of light, Silvestr Shchedrin (1791-1830) was confronting quite another aspect of light in Italy.⁹ When in Rome, where he arrived in 1818, he was content to paint the picturesque ruins in traditional though sympathetic manner; Naples, however, seems to have transformed his vision. Naples, Sorrento, and Capri furnished a dazzling brilliance of light and color that beggared classical values of restraint. The light, instead of falling in the established way over the artist’s left shoulder, seemed always to be radiating from behind objects, reducing objects to colored silhouettes with sharply lighted edges (fig. 7.5). At least this is how Shchedrin and his fellow painters saw it.¹⁰ The Dutch painter Antonio Schminck van Pitloo (1790-1837), almost the same age as Shchedrin, had arrived in Naples in 1815, after studies in Paris and Rome, with his patron, Count Orlov.¹¹ Forgetting his classical training, he set about catching the total effect of the radiant light with the simplest means possible.

No one knows who affected whom, but by the time of Shchedrin’s death in Naples in 1830 a school of painting had been established that was to have a far-reaching influence. During the decade of Shchedrin’s stay, visitors to Naples included, among many others, the Englishmen Turner (1819-28) and Bonnington (1824), the Norwegian Johan Christian Dahl (1821-26), and the Frenchman Camille Corot (1828). Although earlier painters had concentrated on the classical ruins and erupting Vesuvius, the painters now looked upon Naples as the embodiment of light. They viewed the bay through the Grotto of the Posillipo or from the heights and painted over and over again the shores of Sorrento and the house of Tasso, haunted by the long shadows of the setting sun. Freed from the compositions of Claude or the necessity of translating their observations into a system, they were content to revel in the infinite variations of light as it rendered matter transparent and transformed things into mosaics of color. Shchedrin was certainly a major contributor to this exuberant school of landscapists, which would continue in effect until well after mid-century. It was the beginning of a kind of painting based on the direct impression of nature seen as a whole at a given moment, which underlay the work of the Florentine Macchiaioli from 1860 and eventually that of the French painters called impressionist. Its value is to be found, however, not simply in the works of its following, but in its bold, striking effect that established a new kind of identity between the artist and the nature around him.

Another Russian painter who found a source for pictorial exuberance in Naples was of very different temperament from Shchedrin. This was Karl Briullov (1799-1852), who was much too assertive a personality to lose himself in the radiant effects of the Neapolitan sun. Briullov had already made his mark as an extraordinarily able academic painter possessed of dazzling facility before he came to Italy in 1822, and the color and light served him in an expanded expression of his personal sense of well-being. Like the landscapists, he became fascinated with the richness of color to be found in half shadow or reflected light, although he never ceased to be a draftsman, sensitive to precise contours and fully modeled forms. His elegant portraits place his sitters in a translucent atmosphere of glowing color that makes them seem both sensuously present and artistically remote. Like his Italian contemporary Francisco Hayez (1791-1882), who also was a master of elegant portraits, Briullov wished to harness the new observations of color and light for historical painting, making the past as sensuously present as picking grapes in Naples. To make his point, he began a huge canvas in Rome, The Last Day of Pompeii (cf. Bowlt, fig. 6.3). The most enthusiastic of his viewers felt that he had indeed successfully bridged the gap between the past and the present, rendering in direct, vivid terms what otherwise might be a lifeless record. Clearly this was a welcome achievement for a public looking for a lyrical, dramatic expression in a context sufficiently remote to pose no problems of personal commitment. Briullov’s work succeeded in doing in painting what Italian opera was doing in music. It is wrong to see this painting in terms of Delacroix (his exact contemporary), who painted his bold allegory, Liberty Guiding the People, in 1831 and was in Morocco when Briullov was creating his huge painting. Nor is the painting in the exacting factual historical mode of Paul Delaroche in Paris, who had already gained international fame. Briullov steered carefully between an art of self-expression and visual documentation, and the compromise was more readily understandable in his own time than it is today. The generation to follow, in Italy and Russia as well as elsewhere, would drop the lyrical element in its paintings of history to concentrate on an art of direct vision. But Briullov had good company: there was not only Hayez, who shared Briullov’s love of Venetian light and color, but also Giuseppe Bezzuoli, who in 1829, after two years of work, had finished his Entrance of Charles VIII into Florence, which also shrewdly employed a sound knowledge of light and the virtues of color in shadow to make contemporary a notable moment in Italian history.¹² Briullov was very much a man of his time.

But times were changing, as Briullov himself discovered. By the 1840s neither his brilliantly painted ladies nor his concepts of history painting had the same appeal. A chaste and rigid discipline, well rooted in the past, was coming to the fore, and there was less and less patience either with brio or with stock histrionics. Already in the painting of Granet there was more than simply a new objective miracle of light. There was also implied a formal asceticism, a self-negating rigor of vision that would stand against any suggestion of expressive bombast or academic facility. Tommaso Minardi’s portrait of himself, painted in 1807, is that of a religious hermit rather than a Byronic hero or a classical sage.¹³ As did most in his generation, Minardi (1787-1871) began as a classical painter and, as such, enjoyed the support of Canova, but before long his exacting studies of nature, which became almost a religious exercise, made him a symbol of opposition to classical facility. Over the opposition of the older classicists and at the insistence of the students, who were eager for his strict teaching, he was installed as professor at the Accademia di San Luca.

The selective but precise rendering of natural form espoused by Minardi became known in Rome as “purism” (a term earlier used in Italian literature), although it was not defined as such until the 1830s. Its basic principle was a naive vision, the exact opposite of the classical academy, and its models came from fourteenth-and fifteenth-century Tuscan paintings, that is, pre-Raphaelite. Bound up with this belief in the naive, as opposed to the schooled eye, was a moral assumption: that truth and goodness are native qualities in man and can be obscured by superficial learning and facility. This thought was echoed from Wackenroder’s appealing essays¹⁴ to the purist manifesto of 1843¹⁵ and the early writing of Ruskin in the 1840s. The German painters who settled in Rome in 1810, Overbeck, Pforr, and the others¹⁶—called Nazarenes by the skeptical classicists—emphasized the humility of the artist in the face of his art, for which the artist was only an instrument of creation. Frederick Overbeck and his Italian colleague Tommaso Minardi spent far more time making studies for paintings than they did painting, because it was in the study, the direct contact with nature, that the artist could overcome his own assertiveness and identify himself with the larger spiritual order represented by nature. Artists in Rome from various countries were persuaded by these ideas and carried the doctrines back to their homelands.¹⁷ Purism, now often confused with the classicism it opposed, was a major tendency in Western art. In Rome it was inescapable, in part because under Pius IX Minardi and his followers and the venerable Overbeck dominated the redecoration of churches and established the image that was to characterize ecclesiastical art for some generations.

It was into this environment in 1830 that a young man came from Russia who was well schooled in the classical academic method but who doubted the virtue of an institutional hold on art. This was Aleksandr Ivanov (1805-58), whose father was an established academic painter in St. Petersburg. For some four years he worked on a painting of proper classical subject matter¹⁸ and was not insensitive to the lively Roman environment. He showed little interest, however, in the sizable Russian colony or in the more worldly international crowd of artists . Like a true devotee, he preferred to go his own way. He discovered, however, a kinship with those artists who followed a monkish discipline in which art was an expression of religious intensity. In 1835 he completed Christ Appearing to Mary Magdalene. By 1837 he was embarked on a huge painting that was to dominate his thinking for the next twenty years. The subject, The Appearance of Christ to the People (cf. Bowlt, fig. 6.4), was carefully chosen as being Christian without being ecclesiastical; it represented the revelation of divinity to men of common life. Such a revelation had to occur in an environment of common truth, and Ivanov set himself the task of scrupulously studying the exact particulars of the world around him. As for the other Purists, generalization and improvisation had no place in Ivanov’s procedure; spirituality came not through speculation but through concentration.

Ivanov’s studies are of two kinds. The first had to do with the specific delineation of people and things. He produced an incredible number of drawings and painted studies that manifest an almost microscopic concentration on the visible fact. His people are not constructed from the bones out, according to an anatomical system such as that favored by the academy; they are rendered as seen under the closest possible scrutiny. A seemingly casual scrap of drapery was subjected to the same thorough examination, as if in the intensity of looking the artist lost all trace of himself. At some point in his single-minded pursuit of visual truth, Ivanov discovered another aspect of his perceivable world that was no less true than the definition of things; that was light and the extraordinary range of color it revealed. Possibly it was Naples that once again transformed the sensibility of the artist, although Venice also had made Ivanov aware of color in painting. He began to use prismatically pure color to depict the Italian hills. He painted innumerable studies of nude boys out of doors in the glaring sun or showed them in the rich colors detectable in the shade through reflected light (fig. 7.6). The Neapolitan landscape and the vistas south of Rome were evoked in transparent blues and greens. Certainly only Ivanov’s religious convictions kept him from becoming a true member of the Neapolitan school of landscapists.

Since Shchedrin had painted in Naples, Neapolitan painting had taken on greater specificity without losing any of its intensity of light and color. Giacinto Gigante (1806-76), almost exactly the same age as Ivanov, had inherited the mantle of Pitloo and, with a palette akin to that of Turner, continued to produce painterly landscapes of extraordinary luminosity. For all their airiness, however, his paintings have a specificity of texture that holds them fast to the earth. This is even more impressively the case in the paintings of Filippo Palizzi (181897), who settled in Naples in 1837. His devotion to nature as seen was as great as Ivanov’s, and he shared with Ivanov a full range of hue, although rather less intense than that of his Russian colleague. He established a poetry of common nature revealed by light quite different but not unrelated to that evoked by Ivanov’s brilliant studies. It too had its spiritual implications, but Ivanov, even though by now he had come to doubt the success of his huge religious painting, was not yet ready to accept the sensuous aspect of nature as his primary spiritual source.

In 1838 Ivanov had come to know Gogol, who had begun what was to be a series of Roman sojourns the year before.¹⁹ The two men found much in common, and Gogol, who had earlier praised Briullov, now discovered in Ivanov qualities that he found in no other Russian painter in Rome. Both men were going through lonely religious struggles, trying to reconcile a delight in the world with a belief in an ascetic religious morality. Early in his stay in Rome, Gogol had met Giovachino Belli (1791-1863), the vernacular poet of Rome, and had been delighted by his salty, irreverent sonnets. He knew, moreover, the equally lively illustrations by Bartolomeo Pinelli (1781-1836), whose works probably inspired Ivanov’s efforts at Roman genre in 1838. The incisive works of Belli and Pinelli, deeply rooted in the character and traditions of the Trasteverine, who were assumed to be the hardy remnants of the early Romans, would understandably appeal to Gogol, but Rome was for him, as for Ivanov, both an irresistible stimulus and a mortal threat. He could lose himself in the joys of the mild and beautiful Roman nature at the villa of the fascinating Zenaide Volkonskaia²⁰ (who in town lived in a palazzo just behind the Trevi Fountain) and could watch with fascination and irony the teeming activity of Rome, but moral doubt began to gnaw at the very foundations of his art. He regarded his shrewd and worldly observations of character as frivolous and repudiated all he had done that was not of specific and rather narrow moral import. He was persuaded by his religious advisors that to destroy himself as an artist was the ultimate virtue. Gogol died in 1852. Ivanov was still laboring on his religious epic with a waning belief in its power to transform the world. It was finally shown in St. Petersburg, to which Ivanov returned in 1857, and met with little enthusiastic acclaim, although the effort was considered commendable. The St. Petersburg public now had other interests in art, strongly affected in part by the writing of Chernyshevsky on esthetics and social reality. Ironically, the studies that reflect the side of Ivanov that responded to the sensuous beauty of Italy embody for the modern eye a greater promise of spirituality than his immense depiction of divinity revealed to the common folk. For all his individuality, he was caught in a dilemma characteristic of his time: he could not reconcile the traditional conception of meaning—in this case high moral meaning—with his transformed vision. He was at odds with himself.

By the 1850s directions had materially changed in Russian art: Paris supplanted Rome as the artistic center, and in Russia as elsewhere a new wave of national consciousness was affecting the artist. In the second half of the century Italy was only a place for reminiscence, its lessons having been well learned by earlier generations. In Russia, as in the United States, art now had the confidence of a rapidly acquired past and busily took its place in a far more complex and sophisticated society. Arguments about native versus international character in art became as powerful as discussions of aesthetics, as did the uses of art for social change. Much that now happened depended on those earlier years when artists had once more discovered the world, revealed to them by the penetrating, unfettered brilliance of natural—Italian— light. But although the discovery of the world in art could calm and reassure, some artists became aware that the new illumination could also cast the shadows of a new anxiety.

NOTES

1. Memorie per le Belle Arti, Rome, I (April 1785), p. 54.

2. Giuseppe Antonio Guattani, Memorie enciclopediche romane sulle belle arti, antichita, etc., I (1806), p. 43. I have chosen to discuss Matveev not because he was the best of the Russian landscape painters of his time but because, breaking with the Venetian tradition of view painting, well developed in Russia, he symbolizes the beginning of the new Roman-related trend.

3. Memorie per le Belle Arti, Rome, I (December 1785), p. 191.

4. Useful examples of all three are to be found in the Thorwaldsen Museum, Copenhagen. I have discussed these early perceptual painters in “La fotografia e la macchia,” in my Vedere prima di credere (Florence: Quaderni di Storia d’Arte, Universita di Parma, 1970).

5. In 1807 a critic wrote with some wonder of Granet’s interior of the cloister in the church of Gesu e Maria on the Corso,

It is not enough to try to give an account of or render in chatter this master’s paintings: they have to be seen. With very little or nothing he does everything. There is hardly any color, simple actions, few figures; on the other hand, the episodes are happily chosen, the customs exact, the invention bizarre. In his paintings he has need only of a compass and light. Through his manipulation of these he gives every object relief and makes it stand out, enlarges that which is small, surprises, interests, and pleases without betraying or substantially altering the places he depicts.

Guattani, Memorie enciclopediche sulle belle arti . . . , II (1807), p. 112.

6. Emile Ripert, François Marius Granet, 1775-1849, Peintre d’Aix et ďAssise (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1937), p. 72. For a contemporary description, see Giornale Arcadico di Scienze, Lettere, ed Arti, Rome, I (1819), pp. 156-58. The painting was shown also in 1819 at the Paris Salon.

7. Denisov (1811-34), who studied with Venetsianov in the late 1820s, died young, leaving very few paintings, of which Sailors at a Cobbler’s (1832) is the best known. There is a sharp difference between the works of Venetsianov and his followers, and the tightly drawn, often brightly colored, paintings of German painters trained under Nazarene discipline. This latter kind of painting was also known in Russia.

8. Lavr Kuzmich Plakhov (1810-81) studied with Venetsianov in 1829 and later studied in Germany. The Coachmen’s Room in the Academy of Arts (1834) was painted while he was studying at the academy. One of the most prominent Italian painters of shadowy vaults was Giovanni Migliara, who painted in and about Milan, but painters of many nationalities adopted the “Grotto” form.

9. Silvestr Feodosevich Shchedrin went to Italy in 1818 as a pensioner of the academy.

10. Some of the many well-known artists painting luminous scenes of Naples and Sorrento during these and the preceding years were the Italian Gianbattista Bassi (1784-1852), the German Franz Catel (1778-1856), the Viennese Josef Rebell (1787-1827), and the Norwegian Johan Christian Dahl (1788-1857).

11. On Pitloo, see Raffaello Causa, Pitloo (Naples: Mele, 1956). Shchedrin’s presence in Naples is discussed briefly by Raffaello in Causa in Napoletani dell’ 800 (Naples: Montanino Editore, 1966).

12. Francisco Hayez (1791-1882) was hailed as a romantic—and thus patriotic—painter in 1822, when he exhibited his Pietro Rossi in Milan. His most famous historical work, I Vespri Siciliani, first painted in 1822, went through many versions until his most ambitious rendering in 1846. Giuseppe Bezzuoli (1784-1855) was considered the initiator of romantic painting in Florence from the early 1820s and, like Hayez and Briullov, was much impressed by the light and color of Venetian painting. The Entrance of Charles VIII is in the Palazzo Pitti.

13. The portrait remained in the painter’s home city, Faenza, until 1913, when it was made part of the Uffizi’s collection of artist portraits.

14. Heinrich Wilhelm Wackenroder, Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders, published in 1797.

15. The Purist Manifesto was signed by Minardi, Overbeck, and the sculptor Tenerani.

16. Johan Friedrich Overbeck (1789-1869) and Franz Pforr (1788-1812), having laid plans with others for their Lukasbund at the academy in Vienna, came to Rome in 1810 and set up residence from 1812 in the cloister of Saint Isidoro. Pieter Cornelius joined the group in Rome in 1811, Karl Philipp Fohr and Franz Horny in 1815. In 1816 the Nazarenes painted a famous set of frescoes in the Casa Bartholdy, well known by Ivanov.

17. The Academia de San Carlo in Mexico was reorganized by students of Minardi and Tenerani in the late 1740s, a purist group was established in Barcelona, and various painters carried the ideas to England and France.

18. Apollo, Hyacinth, and Zephyr, 1831-34.

19. On Gogol in Rome, see Daria Borghese, Gogol a Roma (Florence: Sansoni, 1957).

20. The Villa Wolkonsky, outside the Porta Maggiore, was later taken over by the British Embassy to the Quirinale.