The report discusses the Renaissance allusions in the painting of the St. Petersburg artist Vyacheslav Mikhailov. His picture “Tondo. Piazza di Spagna” (2002) was chosen as the emblem of the international conference “Actual problems of theory and history of art” in 2015.
In post-modern pluralist art criticism, the leading Russian art historians D. Sarabianov, M. German, V. Turchin are unanimous in opinion about the art of Viacheslav Mikhailov, in which they see rich and strenuous philosophic content in painting, often embodied in an abstract form. Strong classical tradition with an intense emotional charge, characteristic of the artist, lends his works (and “A Tondo” is one of them) utmost concreteness, which generates quickly changing images and gives the impression of an amazing integrity. It is a spectrum of sophisticated deterministic allusions that predestined a choice of this particular painting as an emblem of the conference focused on the idea of Renaissance in art. Explicit and implicit connotations are produced by the very circular shape and color composition. Diversity and elaborateness of texture creates an effect of maximum proximity of perception, so that a monumental work of art is turned into a fragment of a grandiose canvas of the epoch.

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