Description of the picture:
The death of Camille, the sister of Horace – Fedor Antonovich Bruni. 1824. Oil on canvas. 350×526
Bruni is one of the most significant figures in the Russian academic school of the first half of the 19th century. His father, an Italian by birth, served in the troops of Field Marshal Suvorov, at the beginning of the 19th century he moved to Russia, was a painter at the Tsarskoye Selo palaces.
After graduating from the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts in 1818, Bruni lived in Italy for several years. Upon his return, he served as professor and rector of the Academy of Arts, managing its mosaic department, as well as the curator of the Hermitage’s art gallery. Bruni was elected an honorary member of the Roman, Milan, Florentine and Bologna academies.
Bruni’s artistic heritage is very great. He painted paintings on historical themes, portraits, performed monumental compositions for St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg and other churches. He gained fame, drawn from nature and a lithographed portrait of A. S. Pushkin in a coffin, dated “Henry 30th, 1837.”
The painting “The death of Camille, the sister of Horace” Bruni was created in Rome. Exhibited there for review, she glorified her twenty-five-year-old author with the perfection of drawing and composition.
The plot of the picture is borrowed from the history of ancient Rome. This is a legend about martial arts between the three Romans – the brothers Horace and the three Curations – warriors of the hostile city of Rome, Alba Longa. Winning Horace triumphantly returns to Rome and finds his sister Camilla, mourning Curio, whom she loved. In a fit of patriotic anger, Horace kills her. The style and content of Bruni’s painting are characteristic of a new stage of Russian classicism, which experienced significant changes under the influence of the ideas of romanticism. Formal elements preserve the traditional scheme in many respects, and the picture as a whole resembles the ending of a classic tragedy, when the actors settled on stage in beautiful groups.
Her composition is strictly ordered, the figures are placed in a shallow space, parallel to the plane of the canvas, the main character is located in the center. The characters in the picture are antikizi, their poses and gestures evoke the ancient statues. The movements and facial expressions of the characters with their emphasized pathetics clearly illustrate the idea of the work. Beauties combine local, without halftones, colors – red, green, blue, yellow. New trends of the century softened in the picture strict classical norms. Bruni gave the depicted event more historical and psychological certainty and, at the same time, emotional tension!"
