The Appearance of Christ Before the People
Alexander Ivanov (1806 to 1858) · 1837 to 1857
A whole hall was built for this one canvas, and it needs it. Seven and a half metres wide, it shows the moment on the banks of the Jordan when John the Baptist, standing at the centre in a camel-hair cloak, points to a distant figure walking down the hillside and tells the crowd that this is the one they have been waiting for. The crowd is the real subject. Old men, slaves, Pharisees, a boy shivering after his baptism, a young man rising eagerly from the ground: every kind of human response to a revelation is here, from joy to doubt to indifference.
Alexander Ivanov spent twenty years on the picture in Rome, and the walls around you are covered with the studies he made for it: heads, landscapes, drapery, single figures tried again and again. Look at the slave in the foreground with a rope around his neck, whose face begins to light up, and at the figure in the red cloak who turns toward Christ. Ivanov studied the Italian Renaissance masters, especially Raphael, and you can feel their balance in the composition, but the landscape studies he made outdoors, with their fresh light and colour, point forward to a much later kind of painting.
Ivanov brought the finished picture to Saint Petersburg in eighteen fifty eight, where it was received coolly, and he died of cholera a few weeks later. The emperor bought it, and it was later transferred to Moscow, where the Tretyakov built this room for it in the nineteen thirties. Among the faces in the crowd, the traveller in a grey hat near Christ is thought to be a portrait of the writer Nikolai Gogol, Ivanov's friend in Rome.
Did You Know? The man in the grey hat close to the figure of Christ is believed to be a portrait of the writer Nikolai Gogol, who was Ivanov's friend in Rome.
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