Portaits of Higher Officials un the Russian Empire: Representation of the Authority in the Second Half of the XIX Century - the Beginning of the XX Century

Portaits of Higher Officials un the Russian Empire: Representation of the Authority in the Second Half of the XIX Century - the Beginning of the XX Century. The topic of my work is the representation of authority in portraits of Russian officials in the second half of the XIX century. It is considered a portrait to be a work of art that depicts individual identity of somebody. However, the portrait contains possibilities of its representation: social environment, the spiritual world, similar in appearance of person. The second half of the XIX century is widely recognized as a great historical epoch in the development of Russian artistic culture. This is the time of liberal reforms, which had a great impact on the development of public life in the empire. Also, this is the era of photographic expansion and the commercialization of painting. The history of the Russian portrait is written in sufficient detail, but not so many works are devoted to portraying as a way of representing certain social groups. The object of research is the representation of the authority in portraits of officials of various forms (photography, painted portraits). In my work I study the officials as a social group. They were one of the most privileged social group (estates of the realm; soslovie) and closest to the Emperor. My research questions: how the bureaucracy was represented in the portraits and through which methods its authority was depicted in the pictures. In the work I tried to solves a number of problems: first, determination the conditions for creating an art portrait of an official, consideration the specifics of the existence of the portrait of an official in (material-artistic) culture and description of the patterns about how an art portrait was seen.