Applied Arts

Applied Arts

Bronze Horseman imports books on applied and decorative arts, most of which publish research and visual documentation stemming from exhibitions and collections of Russian museums. Russian collections have many works of decorative art originating outside Russia. For example, Baron Alexander von Stieglitz spent one million rubles in the 1870s collecting works of decorative art in Western Europe for his museum-school, so that students in a mechanized age could learn high aesthetic standards from handmade crafts of the past. His collection now forms the core of the Hermitage Museum’s decorative arts department.

Architects often designed the interiors of palaces, specifying in drawings the forms of furniture, candelabra, chandeliers, and vases, which can now be seen in their original interiors in the publications of palace-museums. The palace-museums outside St. Petersburg (Peterhof, Tsarskoe Selo, Pavlovsk, Gatchina, and Oranienbaum), formerly residences of the imperial family, have collections of decorative art built over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by emperors, empresses, and courtiers. These museums have examples of the best workmanship of Russian and Western European artists, which are published in both collection catalogues and thematic exhibition catalogues. Quite a different branch of applied arts —ecclesiastical metalwork and textiles — is published, for example, in the catalogues of the Museum of the History of Religion, also in St. Petersburg.