Mark Antokolsky

The representative of the Russian school of sculpture of the second half of the 19^th century occupies a special place in it. He was born to a very religious and very poor family of the Jew Matys, the owner of a slender inn in Antokol, the suburb of Vilno of Lithuanian province. The parents, burdened with daily concerns, were people of worldly wise and practical. In order to arrange the fate of the son, with whom three boys and four girls grew up together, they noticed the son’s love of painting, which was completely useless for the household, took him to the middle-level master, a very inexpensive one, who familiarized the ten-year-old Mardulh (Mark) with wood carving. That the teenager possessed remarkable abilities, was skillful and an observer, was endowed by nature with an analytical and insightful mind, and therefore “learned” from the master much more that he was able to train him, confirmed the happy occasion. In his “Autobiography” Mark Matveyevich mentioned that the first sample of the humble apprentice - a reproduction from Van Dyke’s painting “Christ and Our Lady,” which he, aiming to suppress unfamiliar awe and internal excitement, reproduced on a wooden board, under the aegis of the Lithuanian General Governor V. N. Nazimov, opened the doors of the Imperial Academy of Arts for him. Then there was the first great work – “Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich the Terrible,” bringing the title of the sculpture academician and a professorship in Saint Petersburg Imperial Academy of Arts, in the near future – the titles of honorary academician of almost all recognized European art academies, Knight of the Legion of Honor of France for the victory and the highest award of the 1878 World’s Fair in Paris.
“Mephistopheles’ Head” is one of the preparatory sketches for a large sculpture (1883, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg). The author worked for almost ten years to develop the image of the tempter and the mystical genius of evil, conceived by him as an antithesis to the parallel image of Jesus Christ, which should have contributed to the correct interpretation and perception of the latter. Initially the image of Mephistopheles was presented to the sculptor in the context of “Faust” by Goethe. But soon, not wanting to tie his hero “to any race, to any time,” he began to “see in him something belonging to infinity.” Then he persistently sought out the concrete embodiment of evil in order to identify precisely its capacious and contradictory essence, stopping at the trampling of the symbol of high human thought - the book, also at the Faust’s costume, which reminded him of the fake and false wisdom of Goethe’s hero that could not be in the sculptor’s character. In his understanding, Mephistopheles not so much constantly tempts and experiences an individual in a particular historical time, but destroys the human personality in general. It is interesting that Chaliapin, who acted as Mephistopheles, “was also seen this image without a prop and without a costume.”
M. M. Antokolsky did not develop new principles of plastic language, but merely combined the expressive means of academic tradition and traditions of consistent reproduction of nature in a harmonious whole, but without blindly imitating it. But his great merit lies in the fact that he revived, decorated and strengthened this union with a true humanitarian content, creating his aesthetic image of the era. “The need to reproduce this image was so strong that, having made it, I release my soul.”
M. M. Antokolsky at the Museum of Russian Art (Prof. A. Abramyan’s Collection):
Mephisto’s Head. The 1880-s