Lot 532: mark antokolsky (1842-1902), the chronicler nestor

inscribed M. Antokolsky épreuve par Mr GEORGE SCHLESINGER No 12 / F. Barbedienne Fondeur, Paris

height 24 in. 61 cm

M.G. Nekliudovoi, ed, Istoriia russkogo iskusstva: Iskusstvo vtoroi poloviny XIX veka, Moscow, 1980, pp. 144-145, no. 206.
L.P. Shaposhnikova, Skulptura XVIII-nachalo XX veka, Leningrad, 1988, pp. 25-26, nos. 57 and 58
E.V. Kuznetsova, M.M. Antokolskii: zhizn i tvorchestvo, Moscow, 1989, pp. 157-163.

In 1901 Antokolsky wrote to Vladimir Stasov (1824-1906), a close friend as well as one of Russia's most important art critics, that it was his "dream to devote the last years of his life to exalting the great figures of Russian history." The statement summarized his desire to return to a theme that he had approached early on in his career in his studies of Ivan the Terrible (1871) and Peter the Great (1872). Nestor was a natural choice for any compendium of Russia's most significant historical personages. In the late nineteenth century, Nestor (ca. 1056-ca. 1114), a monk of the Kiev Monastery of the Caves, was credited with the composition with one of the earliest chronicles of ancient Rus (his authorship was later questioned). The influential nineteenth-century historian Sergei Soloviev, author of the magisterial History of Russia from the Earliest Times, credited Nestor with being the first writer to share his own desire to approach Russian history from "a national point of view." Thus, it is no surprise that the 1890 marble original on which this bronze is based was acquired for the collection of the Winter Palace. It is now housed in the State Russian Museum. Editions of the bronze are held by the State Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow as well as several other major public collections.