On April 28, Manege hosted a lecture by sculptor, art conservation expert, and researcher Pavel Ignatyev.

The Neoclassical style, which arose in the mid-18th century, seemed to contemporaries to be a return to the ideals of antiquity – not only to its aesthetic ideals, but to its ethical ideals as well. The Classicist ideologies of precise proportions, laws of composition, and a strict canon were combined with the concepts of the Enlightenment, noble deeds, and the humanisation of jurisprudence. However, the events of actual history – the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the subsequent Restoration – bear witness to the fact that the ideal form of the classical myth may have actually been suffused with a wide variety of actual content. Russian and European sculpture of the 18th and 19th centuries not only represented the most important ideas of their age, but also seemed to express certain details that at the time were not thought to be obvious.

At the lecture, we have discussed what Neoclassicists deemed to be obvious without any explanation, as well as how we today perceive that ideal world of “resurrected antiquity”

You can watch this lecture on our YouTube-channel.