The Russian style in artistic glassware from the State Hermitage Collection

A significant event for Russian artistic glassware in the second half of the 19th century was the creation of works in what was called "the Russian style". Ippolito Monighetti and Victor Hartmann, two leading architects of the day, were engaged in the development of a "national" style at the Imperial Glassworks, as was Yelizaveta Boehm, the designer of the Maltsov Works. In Monighetti's works from the 1870s we can clearly detect the influence on him of Byzantine art of the 12th and 13th centuries and Early Russian art of the 14th and 15th centuries. The glassware produced by Victor Hartmann in the second half of the 19th century was created with an eye on the artistic legacy of folk crafts: Russian peasant embroidery, carving and decorative painting.
In the 1880s, the products of the Imperial Glassworks were marked by features derived from the art of 16th- and 17th-century Muscovy. In that period the new technique of painting with transparent enamels introduced by the factory's chemists and artists made it possible to produce S-shaped shoots and grotesques on the surface of pieces. The forms of the ornament were closely akin to both Italian and Early Russian prototypes.

Dessert Dish
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Bratina
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Items from the service
for the imperial yacht
Derzhava
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