How Pavel Tretyakov competed with the emperor to create the most famous art gallery in Moscow
Before the revolution, patronage of the arts was considered not only charitable, but also beneficial for the donor himself, and the point here was not taxes at all. According to…

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How Peter Konchalovsky managed to avoid repression and why the artist was called the Soviet Cezanne
Not many painters who disobeyed the socialist regime in times of bloody repression managed to escape punishment. Today I would like to recall the name of one of them -…

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Secrets of "Ladies with an Ermine": What does the cute animal in the painting of Leonardo da Vinci hide
"The Lady with the Ermine" (1489-1490) is one of the most important works of all Western art, the subject of the greatest rarity of the genius Leonardo da Vinci and…

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modern

Fantastic take-off and the tragic end of the discoverer of Russian porcelain Dmitry Vinogradov

Russia has always been famous for outstanding talents, however, the indisputable fact is that these people did not always have sweet and free in their homeland. Russian history remembers many geniuses whose life was ruined by the domestic system. A terrible fate fell on the lot of Dmitry Ivanovich Vinogradov, rightfully considered the father of Russian porcelain, who spent the last days of his life chained to a kiln.

A master was born in the ancient Russian city of Suzdal in 1720. In the early 1730s, the boy’s father, seeing his great inclinations for science in his son, sent him with his elder brother Jacob to study in Moscow, where they studied at the Spassky School at the Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy. I must say, this school was one of the most authoritative educational institutions of the state of that time. At one time, many outstanding personalities studied in it. Continue reading

“The Invisible Artist”, which creates paintings on people, like on canvases

Since today many acts of civil protest in China remain strictly prohibited, a well-known Chinese artist-photographer, master of the original creative camouflage of people, Liu Bolin invented a unique technique for expressing one’s own opinion and view on pressing problems of society. Working with his team of professionals, Bolin seems to dissolve himself and his employees in space, merging with the environment, which emphasizes that modern man is invisible and of little significance to government structures and those in power.

He, with the help of his assistants, fits organically into both urban and natural landscapes, as well as supermarkets and various works of art. Bolin as a canvas can stand, without moving, in one place for several hours against a selected background, while his assistants paint it from head to toe, trying to mix it with the environment. Continue reading

What butterflies meant in the paintings of world famous artists
Butterfly and moth are one of the main symbols in art and a significant number of major artists include this image in their canvases. It is noteworthy that the butterfly…

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Secrets of the painting “A Lady with a Parrot by the Window”: How the Smile of a Heroine and a Bird are Connected
Caspar Netscher is a Dutch artist of German descent, an outstanding portrait painter, and also a master of depicting everyday scenes of the Dutch elite. He also developed a technique…

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The world of childhood of the XIX century in the paintings of Gaetano Cierizi
Many viewers are interested in everyday painting of old masters of the past centuries, who knew how not only to reliably capture the life of their people in the smallest…

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