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 due skill, we can get acquainted with a certain era through a picture.
In addition, painters try not only to depict external attributes, but also to convey the internal state of the person who poses.
Read on and you will find out the milestones of the development of the Russian portrait from the Middle Ages to the present.
Portrait genre in art
A portrait in the visual arts , as we understand it today, has stood out relatively recently. Only in the middle of the seventeenth century, the historian at the court of the French king Louis XIV, Andre Felibien, proposed to call this word exclusively images of people.
Until that time, this term meant all images, be it an animal, plant or mineral. In the Middle Ages , animals had a slightly different attitude than now. They could be summoned to court, tortured and tried according to legal norms.
Following Felibien, Arthur Schopenhauer expressed the idea that animals have exclusively generic traits, they do not have a human personality. Also today, icons are not considered portraits, because they are not written from the original.
Thus, a portrait in art and literature appeared long ago, but in antiquity it was understood as any “graphic work”.
The development of this genre owes two things - improving the writing technique (composition, anatomy, etc.), as well as changing the perception of a person’s place in the world. The greatest flowering of portraits occurred in the eighteenth century, when Western Europe was dominated by ideas about individuality and the realization of the ideal in the personal.
Early period
Actually, a portrait in the art of Russia was born only at the border of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Before that there were images in the medieval style, when the individuality faded into the background.
The basis of the early period of Russian painting are icons. It was such works that existed until the seventeenth century.
But the changes began in the late period of Kievan Rus. The likenesses of group portraits of the Svyatoslav family, 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. So he was rewarded for a donation for construction work.
The first attempts to move away from canonical and church writing towards secular painting occurred 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 decreed and legalized the reflection of kings, princes and people on the icons.
Parsuna
In the seventeenth century, painting continued to improve. We see that the portrait in the art of Russia takes on more and more individual features. A genre like “parsuna” appears. This is a distorted word "person."
Similar works were still created on the tablets with tempera, that is, in the style of icon painters, but they displayed lifetime images of people. The oldest such painting was the parsun Mikhail Vasilyevich Skopin-Shuisky.
True, it was created as a tombstone portrait of the "mantle". But the prince depicted on it was written "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, technology from Europe is being borrowed. So, from the territory of the Commonwealth comes the “Sarmatian portrait”, the genre of the image of the gentry.
In addition, painters from Western Europe come to the Moscow kingdom to train local artists. “Titulars” are created (special books that depict exemplary portraits of European rulers).
Peter's era
Actually, a "portrait" in the art of Russia 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 reflected the spirit of new trends.
Portraits appear volumetric and depth, artists master the perspective. Understanding of the play of light and shadow is born, experiments with colors on the canvas begin. The final separation of church and secular art also takes place.
Now the painting is divided into three streams - archaic, 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, works are completely independent, with their own vision. That is, the development of local world-class painting centers begins.
End of the 18th century
Gradually, a portrait in Russian art becomes the property of the middle layers of society. If until the middle of the eighteenth century only noble persons were depicted, close to the royal family, now portraits of not only nobles and landlords, but even several peasants appear. The latter, in particular, took place solely thanks to educational ideas in society.
In the fifties and sixties of the eighteenth century, portraits of the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna set a special tone. Many noble families ordered paintings similar to this one.
Researchers also see an important path for domestic masters. They expressed their vision in the colors and attributes more inherent in the Baroque, in comparison with European artists who worked in the Rococo style.
The works of Russian painters are simply filled with colorful images, faces filled with life, rosy and rosy-cheeked mistresses.
Classicism and the Silver Age
Gradually, a departure towards chamberness occurs. At the end of the eighteenth century, it is already difficult to distinguish between Western European and Russian portrait. The genre in the visual arts enters the world stage. Only now there are no bright and magnificent baroque forms.
There is a transition through Rococo to neoclassicism and pre-romantics. Sentimental and light notes appear. The main feature of this period was historicism. That is, the tone was set by ceremonial portraits of the imperial family.
This era is reflected in the works of Schukin, Rokotov, Borovikovsky and Levitsky.
Next comes the period of romanticism. Here, the most famous artists are Bryullov, Warnek, Tropinin and Kiprensky.
Later comes the realism that is inherent in the canvases 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
Portrait in contemporary art is determined not by ideology, as it was in Soviet times, but by the 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-garde, Moscow and Leningrad schools, “Builders of Bratsk” are developing. A fundamental feature was socialist realism.
Thus, today we met with the history of portraiture in Russian art.