Художественная культура (Jun 2024)
The Discourse on Free Arts... by P.P. Chekalevsky as a Prologue to the Plot of the Russian Art History of the 19th Century
Abstract
The article is dedicated to the study of the art criticism views of the author of the first Russian textbook for students of the Imperial Academy of Arts, diplomat and Vice‐President of the Imperial Academy of Arts, Pyotr Petrovich Chekalevsky. In his essay A Discourse on Free Arts with a Description of Some Works by Russian Artists (1792), Chekalevsky mainly relies on J.J. Winckelmann, whose republican ideas do not repel him as a Russian aristocrat of the period of Catherine II and Paul I, but even arouse his warm sympathy. Chekalevsky sees the main reasons for the extinction of the arts of different countries and peoples in the despotism of state (for example, Rome of the Caesars’ era) and in the tyrannical power of money, depriving the artist of freedom, without which, according to Chekalevsky, full‐fledged artistic creativity is impossible. The death of art, according to him, can be avoided only if new Athens appears. Chekalevsky pays particular attention to the issues of artistic form, proving that a sculptor can express the idea of his work if he finds an artistic language corresponding to this idea. Meanwhile, the language of the sculptor is different from that of the painter, and confusion of different artistic languages (forms) leads, in a certain way, to empty talk, the loss of both content and form. According to Chekalevsky, it is architecture that requires the greatest creative ingenuity. Not only does he reconsider the ideas of classical art history independently and remaster them thoughtfully, but he also expresses them in the original Russian language. Chekalevsky’s utopia of the possibility of a new arts revival based on a certain republicanism in the conditions of the Russian enlightened absolutism predetermined the most progressive trends in the activities of the Imperial Academy of Arts, and his Discourse on Free Arts... can be called the first “living word” of Russian art studies. The textbook by Chekalevsky contains brief information about outstanding Russian sculptors, painters and architects of the second half of the 18th century.
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