186. My favorite sculptures in the State Russian Museum

January 15, 2018

186. My favorite sculptures in the State Russian Museum

My strong appreciation for the works of art at the State Russian Museum is not limited to the paintings. The sculpture collection here is also impressive and there are many three-dimensional pieces that I made sure to spend time with on each of my visits to the Michailovsky Palace. The body of work produced by Russian artists over the last three hundred years is truly impressive, and I hope that more museums in the United States take notice when scheduling special exhibitions or building their collections of Eastern European and Asian art.

Below are my 28 favorite sculptures on display at the museum. Eighteen are made of marble, seven from bronze, and one each from iron, plaster, and glass (see if you can guess which is which). The sculptors Mark Antokolsky and Bartolomeo Carlo Rastrelli appear the most frequently in my list, so I suppose they are my favorite Russian sculptors (they were born in Lithuania and Italy, respectively, but they achieved professional success while working in the Russian Empire and both are buried in St. Petersburg). Just as with my list of favorite paintings at the museum, these are presented below without additional commentary and in the sequence in which they appear in the museum's galleries, rather than listed in order of preference:

Ivan Vitali - "Portrait of Alexander Menshikov (after the original by Bartolomeo Carlo Rastrelli)" (1849)