Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Peter expected that the artists he brought to Russia would be able to paint formal portraits of the tsar and high officials; capture such amusing curiosities as bearded ladies or two-headed children; restore old paintings; paint palace walls; and depict the parades and festivities marking Peter’s victories. In addition, the visiting artists were supposed to train Russian apprentices.

Naturally, well-known and self-respecting artists had no intention of signing such contracts, and mostly craftsmen and hack artists came to Russia. Their students were a rather sorry lot, too: “Peter felt that anything could be learned given willingness and diligence—and therefore the selection for artists was made the way it was for seamen or artillery-men—by force.”³¹

And this despite the fact that Russia had its own majestic centuries-old painterly tradition. I am speaking of course about icons (without going into their purely religious significance), those astonishing, magical, and spiritually elevating artifacts of medieval Russian culture. But Peter, even though, like all Russian tsars, he grew up contemplating icons, obviously did not perceive icon painting as useful. It was a reflection of his ambivalent attitude toward the church.

While a believer, Peter nevertheless was deeply suspicious of the church hierarchy. Remembering the conflicts between his father and Patriarch Nikon, Peter eventually did away with the patriarchy, informing the gathered church officials that from that moment on they would be ruled by the Government Synod, appointed by the tsar; that is, Peter placed himself as the de facto head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Among its other goals, this move was an attempt to put Russian culture under the autocrat’s direct control and away from the influence of the church—an attempt that succeeded in many respects.

Under Peter, icon painting was downgraded to a level commensurate with carpentry, weaving, and sewing. Since icon painting methods could not be used to illustrate scientific books or execute blueprints and drafts, engravers and their work, which was useful for information and propaganda, came to the fore.

A typical figure in that sense was the engraver Alexei Zubov, a leading master of the Petrine period. His father had been an icon painter in the court of the first Romanov, Tsar Mikhail, and served Peter’s father as well. Zubov was sent to study with a visiting Dutch engraver who instructed the Russian youth, “Everything that I see or think about can be cut into copper.”³²

For a hereditary icon master, such ideas must have been heretical—icon painting was not about reproducing life but about executing the traditional painterly formulas that had been perfected over generations. But Zubov quite quickly turned into an able professional engraver. He moved from Moscow to St. Petersburg and became the first inspired portrayer of the new capital; his majestic 1720 composition, The Triumphal Entrance into St. Petersburg of Captured Swedish Frigates, preserved for us the vital force and visual charm of the young city.

Peter liked Zubov’s work, and he was given important commissions, such as his famous Depiction of the Marriage of His Royal Majesty Peter I and Ekaterina Alexeyevna in 1712, where more than one hundred feasting ladies and cavaliers hail the newlyweds, and the face of the future Catherine I is significantly larger than the faces of the ladies around her (a vestige of the icon painting tradition).

Peter was famously tightfisted, but a good professional could count on a tolerable salary. A timely reminder of one’s accomplishments could help. Zubov received 195 rubles a year, a good sum, three times more than some of his Russian colleagues but half what foreigners got (a humiliating practice that later Romanovs retained). In 1719, Zubov complained to the tsar that in view of the city’s “high cost of all foodstuffs there is nothing to feed my family and pay my debts.”³³

We do not know if the tsar raised his salary then, but it is clear from his petition to Peter in 1723 that Zubov did not live in such constrained circumstances as he tried to portray earlier. Zubov addresses the monarch as “His Most Serene Emperor and Autocrat of All Russia Peter the Great, Father of the Fatherland and Most Merciful Sovereign.” (Emperor and Father of the Fatherland were new titles given to Peter two years earlier by the Government Senate; he was named “the Great” then, too.) After the formalities, Zubov moved on to the point: when the artist was traveling in his own carriage on business to the home of Prince Dimitri Kantemir, he was attacked by two robbers, who tried to steal his horse and beat his servant, “and when they started beating me and my man, I screamed. Hearing my screams, they, the robbers, ran off.”³⁴