The Bronze Horseman: Falconet's Monument to Peter the Great

Rating:
Summary: A Long and Bumpy Ride to Greatness
Review: Having come to the throne in 1762 in a coup, Catherine II of Russia (later Catherine the Great) needed to legitimize her rule. What better way to do so than by erecting a statue commemorating her storied predecessor, Peter the Great, in St. Petersburg? By allying her reign with his in the minds of her subjects, she hoped to consolidate her hold on power.

Such a statue, by an Italian, had been in the works at the time of Peter's death in 1725, and Catherine could easily have revived the project. (It wanted only a pedestal.) But this had to be seen as completely her doing, so she started over from scratch, and in 1764 hired a Frenchman, Etienne-Maurice Falconet (1716-1791) for the job.

There was nothing new about an artist from one country fulfilling a commission in another. But as recounted by Alexander M. Schenker in his utterly absorbing "The Bronze Horseman," this particular tale has an epic cast to it. It also has palace intrigue, a quasi-incestuous love triangle, disputed authorship and mind-boggling feats of engineering. Out of this crucible of personalities and dramas emerged one of the greatest works of art of the 18th century and one of the finest equestrian statues ever created.

Religious proscriptions against three-dimensional images of the deity meant that Russia had never developed a pool of sufficiently skilled sculptors whom Catherine could call on. But that wasn't why she turned to Falconet. She was trying to put her stamp on Russia by opening it up to the West, and Falconet, an intimate of Diderot and other philosophes, could serve not only as an artist but as a conduit to the centers of French power and influence.

Yet Falconet had an agenda, too. He was nearly 50, and his career was in a stall. On the outs with the French king, he was denied the royal commissions that were a sculptor's lifeblood at that time and so earned his living in the comparatively unexalted position of head of sculpture at the Sevres porcelain works. He worried, naturally, that he would die without achieving the career-capping commission that then defined success: an equestrian statue. Under the circumstances, Catherine's invitation must have seemed manna from heaven.

And so, in the company of Anne-Marie Collot, his much younger assistant-mistress, Falconet set out for Russia in September 1766. Collot, an accomplished portraitist in her own right, may have sculpted the head of Peter for Falconet's statue. Or Falconet may have just said that later to justify bringing along a woman to whom he wasn't married. As it happens, she went on to marry Falconet's son and bear his child.

Each of the principals got more than they bargained for. In Falconet, Catherine had a humorless, vain, thin-skinned artist fond of writing tendentious screeds on aesthetics instead of working in the studio. He was a man who saw all manner of slights where there were none. For his part, Falconet had to contend with the meddlings of Ivan Ivanovitch Betskoi, Catherine's chamberlain and the president of Russia's Academy of Fine Arts, who saw Falconet as a rival for the czarina's favor.

Other difficulties plagued the project. Casting the 18-foot-high statue into bronze was an unprecedented technical challenge that took two attempts. The first nearly burned down the foundry. And then there was the base: The statue was to rest on a kind of rocky promontory, Peter's cantering horse seeming to halt just short of its edge. Falconet had assumed it would be made from boulders bonded together. But once again, Catherine had other ideas. Eager for the glory that would attend transporting such a massive object from the hinterlands, she decreed that it be made from a single stone.

Searchers were duly dispatched and the desired stone was located in the forests northwest of St. Petersburg. Named (appropriately) Thunder Rock, it weighed about 2,000 tons. Even trimmed down to a mere 1,350 tons -- Catherine would not permit further reduction -- it was gargantuan: Nothing so large and heavy had ever been transported before. It was like trying to move six Statues of Liberty 15 miles over land and water.

To achieve the impossible, an aide to Betskoi invented what Mr. Schenker calls an early version of the ball-bearing system: The stone was placed on a gigantic sled that ran on rails, with copper spheres between sled and rail allowing it all to be pulled along. Progress was slow; on a good day the party covered but a quarter-mile. The entire overland trip took 41/2 months, at the end of which Thunder Rock was transferred to a special barge for the water trip to St. Petersburg. Incredibly, there were no major mishaps anywhere along the journey.

"Russia was able to claim a technological achievement that excited people's imagination no less than would Lindberg's flight across the Atlantic," writes Mr. Schenker. Ecstatic crowds drew comparisons with the building of the pyramids. Chips of hewn stone were gathered from the forest and made into cuff links and jewelry. In Europe the reaction was similarly enthusiastic. Catherine had got what she wanted, as she would later when the statue was unveiled to great acclaim.

And Falconet got what he wanted, too. If Catherine saw art as an instrument of propaganda and foreign policy, Falconet saw it as a product of his personal vision that would establish his artistic, intellectual and even moral superiority over his contemporaries and the great figures of the past. His statue of Peter surpassed earlier efforts in its realism and psychological intensity. In a stroke it moved him from also-ran to the first rank of sculptors.

Rating:
Summary: Exceptional Scholarship Produces Masterful Study
Review: I'll admit that I knew little about the equestrian monument to Peter the Great popularly known as "The Bronze Horseman" before I read this book. Having finished the book, my appreciation for this artistic achievement has greatly increased. This enhanced appreciation is entirely due to Schenker's masterful approach in discussing the statue.

As one would expect in a work of art history, Schenker gives an analysis of the work's artistic merits. However, he saves this examination until the end of the book. Before he provides his analysis, Schenker spends the majority of the book discussing the influences that helped shape Falconet's approach to sculpting the monument. He shows these influences by providing a thorough look at Falconet's career, his personal and professional relationships, and his personality. All of these aspects are substantiated with solid research. By arranging the study in this manner, Schneker gives the reader enough context to appreciate the statue's artistic qualities when they are eventually discussed.

It's rare to find an art history study as informative, entertaining, and engaging as The Bronze Horseman. In fact, The Bronze Horseman reads more like a novel than a study. One cannot make that claim about too many other histories, much less art histories. Consequently, much as the statue is recognized as one of the world's definitive equestrian monuments, this book will be recognized in the future as a standard for all art histories.