Nicholas I in Sicily and Venice. The Begining and End of the Italian Trip

The article (part 1, Sicily) examines the artistic preferences of Emperor Nicholas I and his family to modern Italian painting carried up throughout Sicily (1845). There are many publications on the Romanovs’ stay in Palermo during family vacation, but almost nothing is said about the tsar’s collection of paintings, acquisitions and orders, however new archival documents on the subject were recently discovered. The main result of Nicholas I’s Sicilian trip was the replenishment of the funds of the Imperial Hermitage with works by such artists as the domestic M. and S. Vorobyov and P. Orlov, as well as Verflute, Gurlit, Duclair, Katel. The efforts of these masters helped not only to capture the royal impressions of the nature of Sicily, but also led to a significant strengthening of the position of the Neapolitan school of painting (with its Sicilian theme) in Russia, previously quite weak. Some of the works have survived to our time and are exhibited in the Hermitage and other museums; others have yet to be studied.