Classical rhetoric in Alexander Ivanov’s painting “Joseph interpreting the dreams of the cup-bearer and the baker”
Abstract
The article offers a new view on a painting by a first half of the 19th century Russian artist — Alexander Ivanov — from the collection of the Russian Museum (St. Petersburg). The picture “Joseph interpreting the dreams of the cup-bearer and the baker” was painted as a programme of the Imperial Academy of Arts in 1827 and awarded by a Major Gold Medal. Proceeding from papers of his predecessors, first from Mikhail Allenov’s monograph “Alexander Ivanov” who most closely approached the interpretation of this work in line with classical rhetorical tradition, however, without knowing it, the author of the article considers the principle of a rhetorical syllogism as the basis for internal form of the painting wherein the antisymmetric disposition of the antithetical periodic style (according to Aristotle’s “Rhetoric”) unfolds. In search of sources of classical rhetoric in Alexander Ivanov’s creativity biographic approach is used, namely psychological influence exerted over the artist by his father which was noted by Nikolay Punin — Andrey Ivanov who had been brought up in the Imperial Academy of Arts in traditions of rhetorical type of thinking. What promoted the rhetorical reading of Ivanov’s picture were Averintsev’s reflections about nature of ancient rhetoric and its long life in centuries.
Keywords:
Alexander Ivanov, Andrey Ivanov, “Joseph interpreting the dreams of the cup-bearer and the baker”, the Imperial Academy of Arts, classical rhetoric, rhetorical syllogism, disposition, antisymmetry
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Articles of "Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. Arts" are open access distributed under the terms of the License Agreement with Saint Petersburg State University, which permits to the authors unrestricted distribution and self-archiving free of charge.