Russian Academy of Fine Arts Museum

Scientific-research Museum of the Russian Academy of Arts is a unique art collection not only in Russia, but throughout the world. It was established in the middle of the 18th century simultaneously with the Academy of Arts and appeared to become a truly unique collection. Only here, getting acquainted with the works of the students and the teachers one can see the first steps of the future artist and which steps lead to the mastership highlights. The Academy of Arts holds the drawings, engravings, paintings of Russian and West European masters, as well as casts of antique and West European sculptures which served as models for drawing in classes of “plaster heads” and “plaster figures”. The building of the Academy of Arts itself which was built in 1764-1772 according to the design of Kokorinov and de la Mothe, two teachers of the Academy of Arts’ architecture class, represents an outstanding architecture monument of early Russian Classicism attributed to “especially valuable cultural heritage objects”. Russian painters and sculptors of the 18th-19th centuries decorating ceremonial interiors, the present residence of the Museum of Academy of Arts, embodied the idea of importance of arts in the life of the educated society and in Russia’s destiny and strived to give the younger generations of masters of “three most distinguished arts” the idea of their honorable calling. Academy’s House Church, Raphael and Titian halls were decorated in 1830s after the design of Ton, the author of the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow, rector of the Academy of Arts in 1840s-1850s.
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