Intellettuali e artisti russi all’Accademia Carrara di Bergamo tra Otto e Novecento

Abstract

This article is meant to be a contribution to the deepening of Italian-Russian cultural relations between the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The attention will focus on the impressions that Accademia Carrara of Bergamo and its painting gallery aroused in the souls of some of the greatest Russian artists and intellectuals of the time. Through the analysis of memories and letters, published and unpublished, we will proceed to the identification of the works actually admired by travelers. We will examine, in particular, the testimonies of the scholar Fëdor Čižov (1811-1877), the poet Vasilij Žukovskij (1783-1852), the painter Aleksandr Ivanov (1806-1858) and the writer and art historian Pavel Pavlovič Muratov (1881-1950), whose admiration for the works of art kept at the Carrara painting gallery is attested in the famous book Images of Italy (1911-1912).