ORLOVSKY, Boris Ivanovich

Russian sculptor. He came from a family of peasant serfs. From 1809 he worked in the Moscow studio of Santino Campioni (1774-1847) and from 1816 in that of Agostino Triscorni (1761-1824) in St Petersburg. His work was brought to the attention of Alexander I, and, after a short period of study at the St Petersburg Academy of Arts, he was sent to Rome where he studied under the Danish sculptor Berthel Thorvaldsen from 1823 to 1829.

The majority of Orlovsky’s works, carried out after his return from Italy, are in a classical style, as in Paris and Satyr Playing the Pan-pipes (both begun 1829 and completed after Orlovsky’s death by Samuil Gal’berg and Dmitriy Savel’yov (1807-43)) and Satyr and Bacchante (1837; all marble, St Petersburg, Russian Museum). His statue of an angel (bronze, 1832-34) on the Alexander Column in Palace Square in St Petersburg is in the same style. In the monuments to the military commanders Mikhail Illarionovich Kutuzov and Mikhail Bogdanovich Barclay de Tolly (bronze, 1829-36) in front of Kazan’ Cathedral, St Petersburg, there is both a sense of realism in the artist’s approach to the portrait and a Romantic animation of form. These works are among the best examples of monumental Russian sculpture of the 1830s.