Ivan Martos

Biography

After childhood Martos never saw his homeland again. In a letter to his nephew in January 1821 he asked about the “majestic Dnieper” and the surroundings of Kyiv, like a man who had never been there; stories of a visit to Kyiv and Ichnia in 1804 rest on folk tradition, and the documents do not confirm them.

He was born in 1754 in Ichnia, a market town of the Pryluky Regiment. His father, Petro Mykhailovych, was the Ichnia company ataman, an assistant to the company commander. The origin of the surname is disputed: Baltic, Greek and even Spanish roots have been proposed. In 1764 the boy was brought to St Petersburg, to the Academy of Arts. Who brought him is not known for certain; one suggestion is a relative who was a priest. He completed the course in 1773 with a gold medal (a minor one according to some accounts, a major one according to others) and went to Italy as a pensioner of the Academy. In Rome he drew from life in the studio of Pompeo Batoni and from the antique under the guidance of Anton Raphael Mengs. He returned in 1779 and was at once given a post as teacher of sculpture. For “Sleeping Andemion” he had already been named “appointed academician” in 1778, and for “Hercules Resting from His Labours” he was made an academician in 1782. The usual academic ladder followed: adjunct professor in 1785, member of the Council from 1788, senior professor in 1794, rector for sculpture in 1814. In 1818 he received the civil rank of actual state councillor.

Martos’s best works are generally taken to be his tombs. The early ones, for Princess Volkonskaya and for Sobakina (marble, 1782), are strictly and finely built, combining high and low relief. Later he separated the figure from its background, as in the tombs of Nikita Panin (1788) and Yekaterina Kurakina (1792). There was also the tomb of Count Kirill Razumovsky in Baturyn (1803–1805). Mikhail Glinka, according to tradition, said of Martos: “his marble weeps.” I would add that in these works what stands out most is the restraint later attributed to Russian Neoclassicism as a whole.

The monument to Kuzma Minin and Prince Dmitry Pozharsky on Red Square was made between 1804 and 1818. It is said that the relief shows the sculptor himself and his two sons. Because of this commission he produced little other sculpture in those years. After the monument was set up in 1817, Martos hardly left St Petersburg; the one exception was a journey to Nizhny Novgorod in 1828 to save an obelisk with reliefs that had been damaged in transport.

His other works include the bronze “Actaeon” for the Grand Cascade at Peterhof, the statue of John the Baptist and the relief “Moses Striking Water from the Rock” for Kazan Cathedral, a marble statue of Catherine II for the hall of the Moscow Nobility Assembly, a monument to Paul I for Gruzino, and a monument to Alexandra Pavlovna in Pavlovsk. His late civic monuments are the Duc de Richelieu in Odessa (1823–1828), Lomonosov in Arkhangelsk (1828), Alexander I in Taganrog (1830) and Potemkin in Kherson (1831). Critics often compare them unfavourably with his early works, but for their towns they became emblems. The emperors Paul I, Alexander I and Nicholas I entrusted important commissions to him.

In 1830 Martos was awarded the badge for fifty-five years of faultless service, and in 1831 he left the Academy because he could no longer climb the stairs. He was given the title of rector emeritus.

He was married twice. The first marriage left many children; his son Nikita, also a sculptor, was killed by Napoleonic soldiers in Italy in 1813. His daughters mostly married artists and architects. From the second marriage came a daughter, Yekaterina, wife of the architect Vasily Glinka.

Martos died in St Petersburg on 5 April 1835. He was buried in the Smolensky Cemetery, and in the 1930s the grave was moved to the Lazarevskoe Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. Under Soviet rule some of his tombs were taken out of cemeteries and given to museums, and the colossal bronze Catherine II in Moscow was destroyed.