Page:Benois - The Russian School of Painting (1916).djvu/72

 only by the academic æsthetics of the time. The contemporaries, treated truly great masters, such as Levitzky and Borovikovsky, with little more than contempt, because their pictures reproduced—with consummate perfection—nothing but nature. On the contrary, people swooned before "Akimov's finger," because it was presented according to all the rules and regulations of the "noble style." Akimov, however, still belongs to the eighteenth century. Just like his comrades Kozlov, Puchinov, and P. I. Sokolov, who died prematurely, he did not completely side with the intolerant fanatics of classicism. He is in quest of graceful lines and gorgeous drapery, and does not disdain "opera-house" effects, such as curved helmets and baroco plumages. This artist, who at the age of ten entered the Academy to escape utter poverty, was too much steeped in the spirit of the epigones of rococo, the traces of which are also discoverable in the first two Russian "historical" painters: Kozlov and Losenko (it is enough to remember the "St. Peter" of the first in the Museum of Alexander III, and the "Hector and Andromaque" of the second in the Academy). During his travel abroad, Akimov took a long time before reaching Rome, and at Bologna, where he was ordered to stay, he could not improve his style by the study of the manneristic masters of the seventeenth century. On his