Arte russa in Italia (PDF)

Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2010 in the subject Art - Miscellaneous, University of Venice, language: Italian, abstract: The Russian art items presented here came to light in 2007, at the Milano Antiquity Fair and successively in Stockholm, after their acquisition from a greater private collection by M. Bortolotto, a Venetian antiquity dealer. In that occasion appeared the first version of this catalogue, to which also the results of a more broader research on Russian Silver art, partially published in Weltkunst 2002/3, are joined now.
The typological diversity and the undiscussed authenticity of the collection enriches with new precious examples our cognisance on a period in the history of Russian art whose products are between the most widespread in the world but, properly for their dispersion, yet insufficiently documented and studied. Many anonym items of important artistic value - testimonies of less known technical elaborations from the end of 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries are still available on the international antiquity market. Their complex make is not easy to interpret.
The realisation of a project in the previewed materials usually ran in collaboration under different experts, sometimes even in different cities.In Russia, the documentation and analysis of the 19th- 20th centuries national artistic production are really in an advanced state, however yet far of being completed. Local as foreign collections continuously bring to light new surprises like, for example, those regarding the ways of the "occidentalizing" or of the manufacturing innovations. For foreigners, the sophisticated techniques, materials and instruments employed by Russian jewellers (the otkrass, graining, photoengraving etc.) still represent an enigma.

Some traits emerged during the iconographical, stylistic, technique and technological analysis of the objects recovered by Bortolotto make relate them to the milieu of the earliest Russian aristocracy settled down in Italy, particularly to the Demidoff and Abamelek-Lazarev, some of the richest people in Imperial Russia, known also for the long lasting contentious between the SU and the government of Mussolini on the possess of their heredity.
Thus the present book represents a case study to the dispersed memory of the Russian New Period, which recovering is hindered by a plenty of difficulties due to the loose of names, documentary sources, archives, libraries or collections.