Sculpture

Sculpture

The books in this section publish works by Russian sculptors and works by Western European artists brought to Russia by such collectors as Peter the Great. The church was the main patron of medieval art; it favored icon-painting and frescoes, and there are relatively few works of sculpture in the medieval period. Beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century, however, a school of Russian sculpture took root; Western European sculptors working in Russia (e.g., J. D. Rachette) taught at the Academy of Arts, and soon native Russians mastered the language of stone and metal: Fedot Shubin and Ivan Martos, for example, sculpted religious images and worldly ones on a level of the best European sculptural art of the late eighteenth century. Most sculptors received their training at the Academy and refined their skills on study trips to Western Europe, most often to Italy. Their works form part of a European revival of sculpture in the second half of the eighteenth century. Works of sculpture became essential elements of the grand public spaces of St. Petersburg from Falconet’s Bronze Horseman to Petr Klodt’s Horse Trainers on Anichkov Bridge. In this section readers will find books on individual sculptors of the tsarist and Soviet periods (e.g., Shubin, Martos, Fedor Tolstoi, Ivan Prokof’ev, Maria Dillon, Vera Mukhina), catalogues of collections (e.g., Pavlovsk Palace-Museum: Complete Catalogue of the Collections: vol. III, Sculpture, book 1), and surveys of different periods.