ABSTRACT
In the late 1840s and early 1850s the Russian artist Aleksandr Andreevich Ivanov (1806–58) painted numerous studies of nude boys posing in the countryside around Rome, where the artist had been living since 1830. These have been discussed primarily in relation to Ivanov's modern plein-air approach to landscape, exemplified in works such as The Appian Way (1845, State Tretyakov Gallery. Moscow), or in relation to the hundreds of studies which he did for The Appearance of Christ to the People (c. 1837–57, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow), a monumental work on which the artist laboured for over twenty years. However, the nude studies are more than mere peripheral addenda to Ivanov's landscape and religious painting, and in this paper I shall examine them in two different contexts: first, as an indication of Ivanov's opposition to the accepted conventions of the Russian Academy of Arts, and second, on a personal level, as the product of Ivanov's possible homosexuality.2 Ivanov himself said in 1858,3 “the art whose development I shall promote will hit prejudices and legends hard — people will take notice of it, and say that it serves to transform life” (Botkin 1880b, xxxiv):4 with their anti-Academic and homo-erotic impetus, his nude studies brilliantly realise this statement of purpose.
