Antiquity – Renaissance – Classicism: a chain of time and the «bundle of groups» in the drawing Russian baths by Mikhail Kozlovsky (1778)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the methods of citing visual images in the rhetorical culture era, which extended from Antiquity to the 18th century inclusive. The drawing by Mikhail Kozlovsky that became his significant achievement in the course of studying the artistic heritage of Antiquity and the Renaissance in Rome was chosen as a case study to achieve this goal. In order to identify prototypes that one of the best students of the Fine Arts Academy could cite in his work the method of iconographic analysis of particular figures and groups of his drawing was applied in the context of preserved documents: reports sent by him to the Academy and, especially, Kozlovsky’s journal of art works that he had seen in Rome. This iconography is considered in close connection with the works of art mentioned and characterized by him in these texts. The analysis allowed us to discover first in the drawing Russian baths images based on the art of Raphael and his pupil Giulio Romano. For the first time in the study of Kozlovsky’s work is also used the iconological method based on the analysis of his drawing through the text of A Brief Guide to the Knowledge of Drawing and Painting of Historical Kind… by his contemporary Ivan Urvanov that allowed to find a theoretical justification of assimilation of the classic images by the graduate of the Fine Arts Academy of the 18th century. The author of the article discovered prototype of one of the groups of Kozlovsky’s drawing in the Vatican fresco Battle of Constantine. On the example of this group (as well as its ancient probable source) he considered a very important figure of visual rhetoric such as the contrapposto (antithesis in verbal art).