Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov

• 1. Introduction

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  Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov spent twenty years painting a single picture. Not sketching it, not revising it occasionally, but devoting the full sweep of his working life in Rome to one enormous canvas. The painting was called The Appearance of Christ Before the People, and by the time it was finished, Ivanov was fifty years old and had little time left.

  He has been called, with a mix of admiration and something close to pity, the master of one work. He trained under his own father at one of Russia's most prestigious institutions. He won gold medals before he was twenty-five. He moved to Rome, befriended Nikolai Gogol, and absorbed the influence of a German religious painting movement. And then he locked himself into a project so vast it consumed him entirely.

  What drove a man of such early promise to stake everything on a single painting? What did those twenty years actually look like? And what happened to the hundreds of preparatory sketches he left behind?

• 2. A Father's Student

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  Andrey Ivanov, Alexander's father, was an art professor, which meant the younger Ivanov grew up inside the world of formal artistic training. At the age of eleven, Alexander entered the Imperial Academy of Arts and studied in his father's own course, sitting alongside a fellow student named Karl Briullov.

  The two silver medals Ivanov received for his early work were a sign of real ability. In 1824, he received a gold medal for a painting called Priam Asking Achilles to Return Hector's Body, a subject drawn from the Iliad. By 1827, he had won the Big Gold Medal of the Imperial Academy of Arts for Joseph Interprets the Butler's and the Baker's Dreams. That prize carried a practical reward: promotion to the XIV grade artists, an official rank within the Russian system.

  His benefactors wanted to send him abroad to study, but they required one more finished painting first. Ivanov produced Bellerophon Sent to a Campaign Against the Chimera to satisfy the condition. In 1830, he left for Europe, passing first through Germany and then settling in Italy.

• 3. Rome and the Grand Ambition

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  Ivanov's first works in Rome were copies, specifically of The Creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel, along with drafts of Biblical scenes. He was absorbing the tradition before trying to extend it.

  Karl Bryullov, his former classmate, had achieved enormous success with The Last Day of Pompeii, and Ivanov likely felt the pull of that example. He began to dream of an epic painting showing the Messiah's arrival among people. Before committing to that scale, he tested himself on something smaller. Between 1834 and 1835 he completed Appearance of Jesus Christ to Maria Magdalena.

  The smaller picture landed well. It was praised in both Rome and St. Petersburg. The Russian Imperial Academy of Arts responded by granting Ivanov an honorary academic degree in 1836. That recognition gave him the standing to attempt something far more demanding. He also befriended the writer Nikolai Gogol during his years in Rome, and he came under the influence of the Nazarenes, a German movement dedicated to reviving the religious sincerity of early Renaissance painting.

• 4. Twenty Years on One Canvas

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  From 1837 to 1857, Ivanov worked on The Appearance of Christ Before the People. That span of twenty years unfolded entirely in Rome, where he stayed to be close to the Italian masterworks and the community of artists who gathered there.

  Ivanov adhered to the waning tradition of Neoclassicism, a style that many of his contemporaries had moved away from. He found little sympathy among them. The world of European painting was shifting, and his commitment to a monumental religious subject in a classical mode placed him at odds with the direction things were moving.

  The hundreds of sketches he produced in preparation for the main canvas were not minor working notes. They were themselves substantial works, even if he did not treat them that way at the time. Ivanov finished the painting in 1857, just one year before he died.

• 5. Death and What Remained

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  Ivanov died of cholera on the 3rd of July 1858, in St. Petersburg, the same city where he had been born. He was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery. In 1936, his remains were moved to the Tikhvin Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, and the monument came with them.

  The critical reception he received during his lifetime did not match what came afterward. Judgment improved significantly in the following generation. The preparatory sketches he had made for The Appearance of Christ Before the People began to be recognized as masterpieces independent of the painting they were made to serve.

  Today the most comprehensive collections of his work are held at the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg and the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. The Russian Museum holds his paintings in the city where he began and ended his life; the Tretyakov, in Moscow, carries work that passed through the hands of one of Russia's great private collectors before becoming public property.