Portrait in the art of Russia. Fine art portrait

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

In this article we will consider a portrait in the art of Russia. The value of this genre lies in the fact that the artist tries to convey with the help of materials the image of a real person. That is, with proper skill, we can get acquainted with a certain era through a picture.

Besides, painters try not only to depict external attributes, but also to convey the inner state of the person who poses.

Read on and you will learn the milestones in the development of the Russian portrait from the Middle Ages to the present.

Portrait genre in art

Portrait in the fine arts, as we understand it today, stood out relatively recently. Only in the middle of the seventeenth century, the historian at the court of the French king Louis XIV, André Félibien, suggested calling this word exclusively images of people.

Until that time, this term meant all images, whetherthat animal, plant, or mineral. In the Middle Ages, there was a slightly different attitude towards animals than now. They could be subpoenaed, tortured and judged according to legal standards.

Following Felibien, Arthur Schopenhauer expressed the idea that animals have only generic characteristics, they do not have human individuality. Also today, icons are not considered portraits, because they are not painted from the original.

Thus, the portrait in art and literature appeared a long time ago, but in ancient times it was understood as any "fine work".

The development of this genre is due to two things - the improvement of writing technique (composition, anatomy, etc.), as well as a change in the perception of a person's place in the world. The greatest flourishing of portraits falls on the eighteenth century, when ideas about individuality and the realization of the ideal in the personal prevailed in Western Europe.

Early period

Actually, the portrait in the art of Russia originated only at the border of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Before that, there were images in the medieval style, when individuality faded into the background.

The basis of the early period of Russian painting is icons. Such works existed until the seventeenth century.

But the changes began in the late period of Kievan Rus. Similar group portraits of the family of Svyatoslav, the daughters of Yaroslav the Wise, have survived to this day. There are also several examples of drawings with some personality, for example, Yaroslav Vsevolodovich with a temple in his hand. Sohe was rewarded for donating to construction work.

The first attempts to move away from canonical and ecclesiastical writing towards secular painting took place during the reign of Ivan the Terrible. We see his images in some books. Such a step was made solely thanks to the Stoglavy Cathedral, which decided and legalized the reflection of kings, princes and people on icons.

Parsuna

In the seventeenth century painting continues to improve. We see that the portrait in the art of Russia is acquiring more and more individual features. There is such a genre as "parsuna". It's a corruption of the word "person."

Similar works were still created on tempera boards, that is, in the style of icon painters, but they displayed images of people in their lifetime. The most ancient such painting was a parsun by Mikhail Vasilievich Skopin-Shuisky.

True, it was created as a tomb portrait "mantle". But the prince depicted on it was painted “resurrected”, revived in a better world, so his features are different from the canonical faces on the icons.

Gradually there is a departure from church dogma, technologies are borrowed from Europe. So, from the territory of the Commonwe alth comes the "Sarmatian portrait", a genre of depicting the gentry.

Besides, painters from Western European countries come to Moscow to train local artists. Created "titulary" (special books, which depicted exemplary portraits of European rulers).

Petrine era

Actually "portrait" in artRussia appears only during the reign of Peter the Great. It was this period that became a turning point in the life of the country. Art reflects the new trends.

Portraits have volume and depth, artists master the perspective. An understanding of the play of light and shadow is born, experiments with colors on the canvas begin. There is also a final separation of church and secular art.

Now painting is divided into three currents - archaizing, Russian and Russian school.

The first is inherent in the transition from "parsuna" to easel painting. The second is represented by the works of foreign masters in Russia. The domestic school was expressed in the works of Nikitin, Antropov, Vishnyakov, Matveev and Argunov.

It is noteworthy that the Russian artists of this period first mastered, so to speak, "caught up" with the Europeans. But after a few years, completely independent works appear, with their own vision. That is, the development of world-class local painting centers begins.

End of 18th century

Gradually, the portrait in Russian art becomes the property of the middle strata of society. If, until the middle of the eighteenth century, only noble persons close to the royal family were depicted, now portraits appear not only of nobles and landowners, but even of several peasants. The latter, in particular, took place solely due to educational ideas in society.

In the fifties and sixties of the eighteenth century, portraits of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna set a special tone. Many noble families ordered canvases similar to this sample.

Also important, researchers see the independent path of domestic masters. They expressed their vision in colors and attributes more characteristic of the Baroque, compared to European artists who worked in the Rococo style.

The works of Russian painters are simply overflowing with colorful images, faces filled with life, ruddy and rosy-cheeked ladies.

Classicism and the Silver Age

There is a gradual retreat towards intimacy. At the end of the eighteenth century, it is already difficult to distinguish between Western European and Russian portraits. A genre in the visual arts is entering the global arena. Only now there are no bright and magnificent baroque forms.

There is a transition through rococo to neoclassicism and pre-romanticism. Sentimental and light notes appear. The main feature of this period was historicism. That is, the tone was set by the ceremonial portraits of the imperial family.

This era is reflected in the works of Shchukin, Rokotov, Borovikovsky and Levitsky.

Next comes the period of romanticism. Here the most famous artists are Bryullov, Varnek, Tropinin and Kiprensky.

Later comes realism, which is inherent in the paintings of Repin, Surikov and Serov.

The Silver Age of Russian painting gave the world such masters as Malevich, Vrubel, Malyutin, Somov, Konchalovsky and others.

Soviet portrait

A portrait in contemporary art is determined not by ideology, as it was in Soviet times, but bythe financial side of the issue.

But between the paintings of Malevich and our time there is a whole era of the Soviet Union.

Here the ideas of the first wave of avant-gardism are developed, the Moscow and Leningrad schools, "Builders of Bratsk". Socialist realism was a fundamental feature.

Thus, today we got acquainted with the history of the portrait in Russian art.