(24 Jan 2019) LEADIN:
A private Russian collector is resurrecting the unique art of stone-cutting by commissioning more and more sophisticated works from local artisans.
Thanks to the collector's personal interest, local family traditions of the famed house of Faberge are being revived but in a completely new form in the Russian town of Yekaterinburg.
STORYLINE:
The statues in this collection are made from semi-precious stones in the so-called "volume mosaic technique".
Unlike solid stone statues, they are made of fragments of different stones carefully selected to match in colour and pattern and then fitted to one another.
Stones such as agate, hematite, quartz, marble and other semi-precious stones are used as raw materials for the production with some small elements made of metal.
It's hard to believe that some metal-looking parts of the statues are made of stones too, for example, this chain mail is made of jasper, while the shoulder straps are made of pyrite.
Other materials include everything from rock crystal to fossilised wood.
Art historian Lyudmila Budrina explains that "the technique of volume mosaic has existed in Europe for quite a long time, and the history of this type of stone-cutting art has lasted several thousand years - but it has had its ups and downs."
"Now this technique is popular once again. The main feature of these works is their size. There are no more works indeed anywhere else that would have a similar scale, and a similar level of complexity of the production," she says.
According to Budrina, the technology of volume mosaic flourished at the Florentine court of Medici during the Renaissance. Spreading through Europe in the 17th century, it was closely associated with court culture.
In Russia, it gained popularity at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries in the works of the House of Faberge and Aleksey Denisov-Uralskiy.
However, the size and complexity of composition never reached this level in the past.
The bigger statues in the collection are 80 centimetres tall, weigh around 100 kilogrammes and are produced by a team of artists.
Budrina says that "in order to create works of this level an artist needs to learn for 20-25 years. The amount of material used (for each statue) is ten times more (than the final statue weight). The average output in terms of statue weight is 10 percent of the material used. For the sculpture which weighs 100 kilograms about a ton of the original semi-precious raw material was used."
That is why the revival of this art would not have been possible without modern patronage.
This particular collection was created thanks to a family of Russian businessmen, the Shmotyevs, living in Yekaterinburg.
"It is difficult not to deal with this kind of art, not to collect it, because it makes you love it, there is a lot of energy and warmth in it, even though it is a cold stone, different meanings, some kind of power, spirit," Shmotyev says.
The collector's personal passion for Russian history determined the choice of characters in the collection.
Heroes from Russian history, Russian epics, of Russian folklore, culture and history are featured such as Genghis Khan, or St. George.
Grigory Ponomaryov, an artist who made several statues in the collection, has been working as a stone-cutter since he was 14 years old.
According to Ponomaryov, the collectors set a new level of craftsmanship by ordering more complex and large-scale figures than were made before.
"It gave such a huge impetus in the development of this genre," he says.
Each piece is the result of the work of a whole team of people who work on it for 8 to 12 months.

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