Bronze Horseman
The Bronze Horseman | |
---|---|
Artist | Étienne Maurice Falconet |
Year | 1768–1782 |
Type | Equestrian statue |
Location | St. Petersburg |
The Bronze Horseman (Russian: Медный всадник, literally "
The statue's
, but was carved down during transportation to its current size and weight of 1,250 tons.Statue
The
In correspondence with Catherine the Great, Denis Diderot suggested French sculptor Étienne Maurice Falconet, a friend of his, for the commission. The empress followed his advice and Falconet arrived in Russia in 1766.[3]
In 1775 the casting of the statue began, supervised by caster Emelyan Khailov. At one point during the casting, the mould broke, releasing molten bronze that started several fires. All the workers ran except Khailov, who risked his life to salvage the casting.[3] After being remelted and recast, the statue was later finished. It took 12 years, from 1770 to 1782, to create the Bronze Horseman, including pedestal, horse and rider.
The tsar's face is the work of the young Marie-Anne Collot, then only 18 years old. She had accompanied Falconet as an apprentice on his trip to Russia in 1766. A student of Falconet and Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, Collot was called Mademoiselle Victoire (Miss Victory) by Diderot. She modelled Peter the Great's face on his death mask and numerous portraits she found in Saint Petersburg. The right hand of the statue was modelled from a Roman bronze hand, found in 1771 in Voorburg in the Netherlands at the site of the ancient Roman town Forum Hadriani.[citation needed]
On 7 August 1782, fourteen years after excavation of the pedestal began, the finished statue was unveiled in a ceremony with thousands in attendance. Conspicuously absent was Falconet, as a misunderstanding between him and the empress turned into a serious conflict. As a result, he was forced to leave Russia four years before the project was completed. Catherine largely forgot about him afterwards, and came to see the Bronze Horseman as her own oeuvre.[3]
The statue portrays Peter the Great sitting heroically on his horse, his outstretched arm pointing towards the River
Thunder Stone
For the pedestal, a
Carburis directed workmen to wait for winter, when the ground was frozen, and then had them drag the large stone over the frozen ground to the sea for shipment and transport to the city. He developed a metallic
According to the fall 1882 edition of La Nature, the stone's dimensions before being cut were 7 by 14 by 9 metres (23 ft × 46 ft × 30 ft). Based on the density of granite, its weight was determined to be around 1,500 metric tons (1,700 short tons).[8] Falconet had some of this cut away shaping it into a base, so the finished pedestal weighs considerably less.
Siege of Leningrad
A 19th-century legend states that while the Bronze Horseman stands in the middle of Saint Petersburg, enemy forces will not be able to conquer the city. During the 900-day
Poem
The Bronze Horseman is the title of a poem written by
In the poem, Pushkin describes the fates of the poor man Evgenii and his beloved Parasha during a severe flood of the Neva. Evgenii curses the statue, furious at Peter the Great for founding a city in such an unsuitable location and indirectly causing the death of his beloved. Coming to life, the horseman chases Evgenii through the city. The poem closes with the discovery of the young man's corpse in a ruined hut floating at the edge of the river.
In 1903 the artist Alexandre Benois published an edition of the poem with his illustrations, creating what was considered a masterwork of Art Nouveau.
The poem has inspired works in other genres: Reinhold Glière choreographed a ballet based on it, and Nikolai Myaskovsky's 10th Symphony (1926–7) was inspired by the poem. The statue itself has been seen as the inspiration or model for a similar statue which appears in Joseph Conrad's 1904 political novel Nostromo, thus implicitly linking the political events in Nostromo with Conrad's 1905 essay "Autocracy and War" on the subject of Russia and his eventual 1912 novel Under Western Eyes (and also with the Pushkin poem and with the political issue of Poland).[9]
Gallery
-
Statue of Peter the Great in the winter
-
Side with the Latin inscription. The other side of the pedestal carries the same inscription in Russian.
References
- ^ Adam 1977, p. 42−45
- ^ "St. Petersburg in Architecture: The Bronze Horseman". University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning. 2003. Archived from the original on 31 December 2006. Retrieved 22 April 2007.
- ^ a b c d "Bronze Horseman". Optima. 2007. Retrieved 23 April 2007.
- ^ a b "The Bronze Horseman". Saint-Petersburg.com. 2007. Retrieved 22 April 2007.
- ^ "Saint Petersburg". TourArena. 2001. Archived from the original on 27 September 2007. Retrieved 22 April 2007.
- ^ "Lakhta". Saint Petersburg Encyclopaedia. Archived from the original on 13 February 2012. Retrieved 22 April 2007.
- ^ a b "Thunder-Stone". Saint Petersburg Encyclopaedia. Archived from the original on 13 February 2012. Retrieved 22 April 2007.
- ^ a b c d e "Transport du piédestal de la statue de Pierre le Grand". La Nature magazine, second semester 1882. (in French). Retrieved 22 April 2007.
- ^ Cairney, Christopher (2004). "Pushkin, Mickiewicz, and 'The Horse of Stone' in Nostromo". Conradian. 29 (2): 110–115.
Notations
- (in French) Histoire et statues des personnalités qui ont marqué Saint-Pétersbourg
- Adam, Jean-Pierre (1977), "À propos du trilithon de Baalbek: Le transport et la mise en oeuvre des mégalithes", Syria (in French), 54 (1/2): 31–63,
- (in French) Les Français à Saint-Pétersbourg, extrait du livre de N.Smirnova, ci-dessous.
- (in French) Transport du piédestal de la statue de Pierre le Grand, in La Nature, 1882.
- Ruprechtsberger, Erwin M. (1999), "Vom Steinbruch zum Jupitertempel von Heliopolis/Baalbek (Libanon)", Linzer Archäologische Forschungen (in German), 30: 7–56
Bibliography
- (in French) Natalia Smirnova, Saint-Pétersbourg ou l'enlèvement d'Europe, éd. Olizane, Genève, 1996 ISBN 2-88086-191-8
- (in French) Christiane Dellac, Marie-Anne Collot : Une sculptrice française à la cour de Catherine II, 1748–1821, L'Harmattan, (2005) ISBN 2-7475-8833-5.
Further reading
- Alexander M. Schenker, The Bronze Horseman: Falconet's Monument to Peter the Great, Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 2003 ISBN 0-300-09712-3.