The Rossi Wing

Works from the 17th – Early 18th Centuries

Room I shows works from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, including carvings and paintings on wood, wrought iron, ceramics and printed cloth. Most of the exhibits are still linked to the way of life and traditions of Old Russia, which continued to influence peasant art even after Russia moved to a more secular culture at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Other works from the first half of the eighteenth century reflect the changes resulting from the reforms of Peter the Great. These changes can be seen in the new forms of objects, subjects and ornamental motifs.

The wooden table bottom – the lower part used to store cutlery – is a unique work of seventeenth-century carving. Painted bast-fibre trunks were used to store fabrics, clothes and headwear. The walls and lids were decorated with genre compositions, conveying, in ornamental form, scenes of carousing and meetings between gallant ladies and gentlemen dressed in the sort of European attire introduced during the reforms of Peter the Great.

Gingerbread boards of various sizes and dimensions were used to create patterns on home baking. The carved ornamental design was transferred onto the dough, creating images of fantastic birds and beasts, double-headed eagles, vases with flowers and fairytale castles. Traditional beer scoops in the form of swimming birds or boats were used to hold refreshments and to decorate tables on festive occasions.

Monochrome green or polychrome tiles were decorated with relief images of birds pecking berries, birds of paradise, unicorns, griffins or Alexander the Great. Tiles animated the outsides and insides of buildings in the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century.

The works of wrought iron were represented by candlesticks – the stands for holding burning splinters of wood used to light the inside of a peasant hut, “teremok” caskets,  cleavers for chopping cabbage. Their forms reproduce the shapes of flowers on long, thin stems.

The simplest way to decorate fabric was to print a pattern onto homespun canvas from a carved wooden board covered in paint. In the seventeenth century, printed fabrics were made on linen or hemp canvas using black paint, supplemented in places by hand. Printed cloth was used to sew church vestments, curtains, tents and religious banners, to bind books and to upholster walls and furniture.