Religious Painting
Russian letters: to the Slavophiles, to Gogol, and partly also to Dostoyevsky. At the same time he remained perfectly independent of literature, an artist in the full sense of the word.
The education Ivanov received is fully responsible for his lack of inward unity. The son of that stern classicist, Andrey Ivanov, who was sent to the Academy straight from the Foundling Hospital, and gradually turned there into a flawless professor, Alexander spent his youth in the suffocating atmosphere of academic scholasticism. Moreover, this classical system assumed in the austere, respectable middle-class family a peculiar coldly official character, impregnable, and extremely narrow. A humdrum existence, both at home and at school, was Ivanov's life before his trip abroad. To the Society of Encouragement of Artists belongs the honour of having saved this Russian master. Greatly encouraged by the striking success of their first travelling scholars, the brothers Bryullov, the Society decided to send Ivanov also to Rome, and in 1831 he left his native country, whither he was destined to return only a month before his death. The real Ivanov found himself and developed abroad, where he lived for upward of twenty-five years.
He did not assert his individuality at once. On the contrary, Rome, at first, nearly proved his undoing, for
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