Portrait of Lomonosov: description

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

Mikhail Lomonosov has long been called a textbook personality. Every schoolchild from a young age knows about an outstanding scientist, or at least about his existence, and recognizes his appearance in the portrait.

Mikhail Lomonosov: a portrait of a scientist based on a drawing by Schulze

In the painting of the XVIII century, paintings depicting people were in special demand. This was largely due to the need of people to leave a mark on history and pass on to posterity information about what the outstanding minds of their time looked like.

Such a person as an outstanding scientist, a pioneer in many fields of science, an encyclopedist, a poet and just a great person with remarkable physical strength could not do without the attention of artists.

Lomonosov's portrait is familiar to everyone since childhood. Few people know that such a familiar image of a scientist has several interpretations and sometimes it is very difficult to distinguish the hand of the masters. Among the many works of considerable interest among art critics is the engraving portrait of Lomonosov, written by M. Schreyer based on the drawing of his colleague and teacher H. Schulze.

The composition of the work is not muchdiffers from that of Fessar, but it can be seen that Schreyer introduces a number of interesting details. The scientist does not keep both hands on the table, but sits in an open pose, exposing his chest in a caftan sloppily worn at home. In one hand, Mikhail Vasilyevich holds notes, and in the other a pen. His facial expression betrays extreme thoughtfulness, but at the same time you can catch notes of enthusiasm in his eyes. The viewer is presented with a portrait of Lomonosov, who is busy with the thought process and at the same time tries to carefully fix everything on paper. Books open in front of him lie in working negligence.

An unexpected fact about engraving

Schreier's engraving depicting a portrait of Lomonosov has one feature over which art historians are still racking their brains. It is assumed that the work was written according to a drawing by Schulze, but he was born in 1749, which does not fit with the date of the engraving - the end of the 18th century. Upon closer examination of the picture, one can notice that in the open book in the foreground one can see the name of Peter I, and not Elizabeth, during whose time Lomonosov lived. The overall composition is stylistically built in the spirit of the Baroque, although the end of the 18th century is considered the period when classicism dominated painting. Based on these inconsistencies in the art world, there is an assumption that the portrait of Lomonosov by Schreyer's hands went through several stages of its development, and the artist himself did not personally contact the scientist. Initially, a portrait of Mikhail Vasilyevich was created, then Schulze made a drawing from him. At the last stage, Schreier createdhis famous engraving based on a pencil sketch by his teacher and colleague.

Stylistic features of engraving

The baroque style mentioned above in the picture, which had no place in the 18th century, is explained by the artistic technique that came to us from the time of the Roman Empire. Having set a goal to write an engraving depicting an outstanding scientist, Schulze, and after him, of course, Schreyer found a suitable prototype of the painting, which depicted Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And, taking it as a basis, they “implanted” the head of Lomonosov on the body of the thinker. It is this fact that explains the stylistic discrepancy in Schreir's engraving with the canons prevailing in painting at the end of the 18th century.