Part3 rev PJT 4 Nov
7/11/07
2:46 pm
Page 236
Europe. Following his accession to the Imperial Throne in 1825, the new Tsar, Nikolai I, actively encouraged this nationalism since it paralleled his territorial ambitions for the Russian empire and, gradually, Russia began to turn towards the West while, at the same time, rediscovering her cultural past and extending her territories southward towards the Islamic lands bordering Turkey, Persia and Afghanistan. As part of this cultural movement, Alexei Nikolaevitch Olenin (1763–1843), Director of the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg after 1817, commissioned his protégé, Fedor Grigorievitch Solntsev (1801–92) in 1830 to spend time in Moscow drawing items in the Treasury and Arsenal Museum of the Moscow Kremlin. Solntsev’s drawings were published by the Archaeological Commission in Moscow in six volumes, entitled Antiquities of the Russian State, between 1849 and 1853. Sazikov is known to have used Solntsev’s drawings as the basis for the design of many of the objects that he made especially for exhibition in London at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Although the items exhibited in London by Sazikov in 1851 did not include any weapons – being largely items of table silver such as cups, vases, table centrepieces, candelabra and goblets – one of the items exhibited, a covered drinking cup, incorporated decorative vertical bands on its semi-spherical belly that are identical to the pattern of overlapping-scale design on the rear edge of the scabbard of our kastane. Given that the Arsenal Museum of the Moscow Kremlin contains several kastanes – at least one of which (no. OP-367) has a cut-down and much earlier Western blade – it may well be that the hilt of our kastane was copied by Sazikov from a drawing made of one of them by Solntsev and that its magnificent scabbard was directly inspired by a combination of decorative influences, both Russian and more Western in origin. However, it is recorded that the Moscow kastane OP-367 was transferred from St Petersburg to Moscow in 1843 after some