The Eighteenth Century
tion of the Tzarskoye Selo Palace, testifies even more eloquently to the height attained by the instruction in technique of the period.
Byelsky was in his time known as a stage decorator, but his oil paintings alone have come down to us. His "Ruins" (in the Museum of Alexander III and the Tzarskoye Selo Palace) are little more than an absurd accumulation of Bibiena's barocco. They have not a trace of the orderliness and grandeur, by which the compositions of Pannius and Hubert Robert are distinguished. And yet, Byelsky is an astonishing phenomenon in mid-eighteenth-century Russia. The very fact that he was able to master such a tremendous mass of forms, that he was able to glue together into one whole all these arcs, colonnades, pilons, and, thus, solve problems most difficult in their way, commands our respect.
Unfortunately, Byelsky had no worthy successors among his compatriots. Russian architectural painting produced one more artist, the feeble Farafontyev, and then fell into a state of complete oblivion. People were compelled to summon foreign stage decorators, of whom the most celebrated were the two Gradizzi, Tischbein, the older Gonzago, Canoppi and Coller. In the middle of the nineteenth century architectural painting disappears completely, as it found no appre-
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