On a Source of the “Byzantine Project” by Prince Grigory Gagarin: Dominique Papety

Abstract

The article is devoted to the work of the French artist Dominique Papety, whose copies of Mount Athos paintings served as one of the sources of the “Byzantine project” of Prince G.G. Gagarin, who later became vice-president of the Imperial Academy of Art and who strived to revive the “national” ecclesiasti cal art in Russia. The analysis of Papety’s works and of his views on art shows that in his religious works the art ist was inspired by the art of the remote past - in par ticular, that of Byzantium, while in his secular paintings he followed the painters of late Renaissance - Rapha el’s third manner, Titian, Michelangelo, Paolo Veronese, Bellini, Francia. Special attention is paid to the art ist’s travel to Mount Athos, undertaken by him in 1847 under the impression of the Athos manuscript with in structions for icon-painters that had been published two years earlier by A.N. Didron, an archaeologist. The cop ies of the frescoes by Panselinos, a Greek painter of the 12th century (according to Mt Athos monks), that were made by Papety at Mount Athos, show the impact of academic education on the French artist, who per fectly mastered the “plasticity” of form in pain ting. This feature of Papety’s copies allows the author of this ar ticle to conclude that, for Gagarin, they must have be come a visible demonstration of the fruitfulness of com bining the “Greek Christian thought” with the “Greek pagan form”. The idea of this combination was subse quently used by Gagarin to revive the “national style” in church paintings.