From Moscow to St Petersburg
In her voluminous survey of Peter the Great’s Russia, the historian and art historian Lindsey Hughes suggested that in order to get a sense of the cultural difference between Moscow and St Petersburg, one should first visit the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and then the Russian Museum in St Petersburg. The one created in 1856 by the merchant Pavel Mikhailovich Tretyakov is filled to the brim with outstanding examples of Russian icon painting such as we have been sampling over the last few weeks. By contrast, the portraits in the Russian Museum conjure up the era of William and Mary, and offers more of a European experience.[1] Yet as Hughes asks do these portraits of elegantly dressed rulers and courtier complete with fashionable hairstyles and settings “reflect Russian reality?” As with most cultural situations, deeper research reveals a more complex and interesting story. Here despite Peter’s Cultural Revolution, reforming programme, whatever one calls it, an “attempt at cultural engineering” is on show, not the outward expression of the completed revolution.[2] Another point Hughes highlights is that despite artistic and cultural innovation being concentrated in St Petersburg, the material and symbolic place of reform, before 1710 the leading Russian artists were to be found in Moscow. Indeed the geometrical order found in St Petersburg has its origins in Moscow- see below. Moreover during this period Moscow art seems to be a mainly domestic affair: the armoury accounts for 1701-2 list no foreign painters. Instead we see names like Ivan Saltanov (1630s-1703) (above), Mikhail Choglokov, and Grigory Odol’sky, most of whom were traditional icon painters. A break between this traditional workshop activity and Peter’s modern Russia is symbolised in Zherebtsov’s creation of triumphal gates, which were an innovation of the Petrine era. These are derived from Roman models and appear after the capture of Azov in 1696. Though the building of St Petersburg (“a city out of nothing”) tempts us to claim an artistic break from Muscovite art, we should be careful of neglecting the old city’s role in the Petrine revolution.
[1] Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great, (Yale University Press, 1998), 203.
[2] James Cracraft observes that Peter’s revolution was not social nor economic, but cultural, that is to say having to do with making and doing things, thinking and talking about them; these fundamental changes would emerge through language, art, music, painting, sculpture, the graphic arts; other forms of culture would be cooking, dressing, dancing, courting, fencing etc. James Cracraft: The Revolution of Peter the Great (Harvard University Press, 2003), 75-76.
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