Sculpture

The Pavlovsk museum has on display an interesting collection of antique, Western European and Russian sculpture, the greater part of which was acquired at the close of the eighteenth century during the construction of the palace and formed a part of artistic ensembles of its main rooms.

A most notable is a rare collection of antique sculpture by Roman masters of the second and third centuries (about 40 units), including statues, bust portraits and bas-reliefs mounted in the walls of palace rooms.

Western European sculpture is in the first place represented by works of the well-known Italian and German masters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as A. Algardi, C. Albacini, P. Triscorni, T. Tadolini, Ch. D. Rauch, G. Gerhard and others. The collection of Russian sculpture comprises masterpieces by the leading sculptors of Russian Classicism Mikhail Kozlovsky and Ivan Martos.

Besides this, there are numerous marble reproductions of Greek and Roman statues created in the eighteenth century. One of the most remarkable among them is the Apollo Musagetes and Muses series cast in the workshops of the Russian Academy of Arts in the period 1780-98 after moulds of famous ancient statues in the museums of Rome and Florence.

On the whole the palace rooms are decorated with about 100 various pieces of sculpture.