Translated material
Virtual altar completed
The Tretyakov Gallery has released an electronic catalog of paintings by Alexander Ivanov
On Thursday, in the State Tretyakov Gallery building in Lavrushinsky, a presentation of a new multimedia resource took place - a disk with a complete catalog of the paintings of Alexander Ivanov, stored in the Tretyakov Gallery and the Russian Museum. The compiler of the electronic publication is a researcher at the State Tretyakov Gallery, Doctor of Art History Svetlana Stepanova, the implementation of the publication is the association “Artistic Design Workshop”.I'm pleased with the simple structure and convenient form of communication with the catalogue. In the main menu there are section names; if you click on them, you can see both the catalog and the chronicle of the master’s life, and travel around modern Italy, to the places where the artist was and worked. A modern photograph, for example, of the soil at the Capuchin monastery in Albano is replaced by a sketch of the soil at the gates of the Church of St. Paul created by Ivanov in Albano. What inspired the artist fascinates us today.
The design of the disc is unpretentious and not devoid of elegance. At the bottom of the screen of the main page float views of the Roman Campania captured by Ivanov, which became the prototype of biblical Palestine, the setting of the artist’s main painting, “The Apparition of the Messiah.” Ivanov’s sketches for various monumental canvases change on a large field of the screen. All the clickable sections are located tactfully below the images. There are many hyperlinks: to meetings, to historical subjects, and to people with whom the great artist communicated. Each picture can be felt with the eye in macro magnification using a magnifying glass. The scanned images (processed by G.B. Baranov) are of excellent quality. It is known that many of Ivanov’s sketches are double-sided. Both the front and back sides are reproduced in the new catalogue. Compiler Svetlana Stepanova jokes that the virtual catalog has even more “storage units” than the real one.
For communication with the heritage of the famous Moscow museum, this disc is of course a fundamental step into the future. Printed catalogs-raisonnés of the Tretyakov Gallery collection are published regularly. However, they come out in limited editions, are expensive, and are not available to many educational institutions (especially in remote areas of the country). The new disc is a help in lecture courses and seminars on the history of art. It became the second panel of an electronic diptych about the master’s work. The first, with a catalog of the artist’s graphics, came out two years ago. One might say that the Tretyakov Gallery created a virtual altar for Alexander Andreevich Ivanov.