ST. PETERSBURG - If you want historical sweep and grandeur, no place on earth delivers more than Russia. A multitude of ethnicities has lived under its banner for centuries, never completely coalescing, but contributing to a cultural mix that defies easy analysis. Russia's is a great story, a huge story.
An exhibition at the Florida International Museum, opening Sunday, aspires to tell the tale, or a good part of it. "Russian Odyssey: Riches of the State Russian Museum" has been handsomely installed in 10 galleries created to place the artifacts within the context of their time and their role in Russian life.
Using literary parlance, the exhibit does not deeply plumb the Russian "soul" in the way a Tolstoy novel does. (Though the great man is represented by a portrait here.) Nor does it deal with the oppression, economic or political, that has shaped the Russian psyche. Solzhenitsyn's gulag archipelago is nowhere in sight, nor are Gorky's grindingly poor laborers. (Peasants are represented in the "Folk Life in Russian Art" gallery as a mostly jolly lot who wear colorful clothes in warm domestic settings.)
Still, this is a tale well told.
The largest and best part of it comes at the beginning with a collection of religious art, mostly icons and altar panels, most from the 16th century. They combine the conventions of Byzantine icon painting. From a flat plane, the holy figures face forward, looking directly at the viewer, the better to serve as a personal link between heaven and earth. For the benefit of a mostly illiterate population, the figures themselves are immediately identifiable by key characteristics; St. Nicholas, patron saint of Russia, for example, is always painted with a high, cerebral forehead and curly hair. Many are covered by oklads - ornate coverings usually rendered in precious metal to protect the holy images from too much physical adoration.
They also reflect a certain chafing against conventions typical of that time period - icons had been around in Russia for at least 500 years at that point - and there was a move toward allowing the expressive, individual style of the painter to come through. But unlike religious art in Italy, where the Renaissance was in full flower and Michelangelo was working on the Sistine Chapel, religious painting in Russia was much slower to evolve from a strictly devotional purpose to "art" created and valued for its own distinct beauty.
Cases contain religious objects such as chalices and vestments, as well as secular items that range from old jewelry, nicely rendered household objects such as inkwells and drinking paraphernalia, and several wedding crowns from the 19th century. The crowns are wrought from gilded silver but, typical for that time I'm told by Cynthia Duval, one of the show's curators, embellished with paste "diamonds" rather than real rocks.
For most of the rest of the exhibition, a series of vignettes showcases the art and artifacts. (A re-creation of a monk's cell is tucked into the middle of the religious art gallery, more as a scenic break from so much iconographic stimulation than an aesthetic vehicle.)
Documentary paintings and portraits help the transition to installations that highlight the eras of Russia's two greatest monarchs, Peter and Catherine. They are somewhat modest presentations, given the combined star power of these larger-than-life personalities. We get portraits, period furniture, domestic artifacts and mannequins wearing reproductions of their clothes. Some of the objects are very precious, such as a glass goblet engraved with the initials of Peter's wife. Even rarer is porcelain tabletop statuary from the Imperial Factory in St. Petersburg, part of the Arabesque Service, the first such commission from Catherine, and part of a dinner set.
Adjacent galleries deal with peasant life, complete with a log cabin and bright folk costumes, and that of the nobility from the 18th to the 20th centuries. Both contain the bulk of the paintings in the exhibition, more than 30, no masterpieces among them. There are some recognizable names in the roster of artists (if you're conversant with Russian art, which I'm not; a Google search enlightened me), but don't expect anything on the level of a Kandinsky or Chagall. That, said Yevgenia Petrova, deputy director of the State Russian Museum and chief curator for the exhibition, is by design.
"The main goal was to select objects to create an atmosphere," she said through a translator. "Artifacts, not art."
That point needs to be impressed on visitors: This is a historical exhibition and does not aspire to high visual or decorative art. So, the genre paintings of larking peasants in a bucolic countryside or stately families in their beautiful interiors are charming; landscapes show us the brooding beauty of a Russian winter and portraits give us a human connection to the brass samovars and porcelains on display among the period rooms.
Dominating a central space is a partial re-creation of the famous White Room from the Mikhailovsky Palace, a home of Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich. A set of empire furniture, massive and gilded, dominates it, with lots of ornate vases and pedestals, set on a floor emulating the original parquet and behind a large curving wall covered with a huge photographic reproduction of the palace's boiserie.
Further on, tucked in a corner, is a homage to the writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky with a desk scatter with manuscripts and letters.
The shift to the final vignette is abrupt, but it's a wonderful surprise, a section devoted to the great ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes. Gossamer costumes of silk chiffon look as if they could float off the mannequins. An especially sumptuous one encrusted with beading and metallic wings could fly. The original set designs in pastels and paintings may not be great art but, in their class, they're first-rate.
Departing visitors will see one final image, What an Expanse!, a painting by Illya Repin. It's a large and exuberant work. A man and a woman, stylishly dressed, have waded out, improbably, into the shallows of a roiling sea that dwarfs them. They look happy, not in the least threatened by the darkening waves behind them, gazing at each other, seemingly unaware of being drenched by the swirling waters around them.
Petrova said she chose it as a coda "to give the sense of freedom, of endless space."
That it does, and more. Painted in 1903, it foreshadows a later chapter in Russia's story, one of violent change that most people of the privileged class - perhaps these two lovers among them - could not have anticipated. Instead, we're left with their oblivious joy and a sense that they, and most of the exhibition, reflect the version of the story that might ignore some obvious, hard truths but entertains and delights nevertheless.
"Russian Odyssey: Riches of the State Russian Museum" is at the Florida International Museum, 100 Second St. N, St. Petersburg, Sunday through April 4. Hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Thursday and Saturday; 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Friday, and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $15 for adults. (727) 822-3693.
