Painting and Sculpture
Chaos. The Creation of the World
Chaos. The Creation of the World (Russian: Хаос. Сотворение мира) is an oil-on-canvas seascape by the Russian Romantic painter Ivan Aivazovsky. He completed it in 1841, at the age of twenty-three, during the Italian leg of the travel stipend awarded to him by the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg. The picture shows the moment of biblical creation given in Genesis 1:1–3, with a humanoid figure of light rising from a torn storm-cloud above a heaving sea. When Chaos was shown in Naples and Rome in 1841, the Italian press treated it as the sensation of the season. Pope Gregory XVI offered to buy it. Aivazovsky refused the fee and gave the canvas to the pope as a gift. In return he received a gold medal. Nikolai Gogol, whom Aivazovsky had befriended that winter in Rome, marked the news with a remark that became famous in Russian writing on the painter: "Glory to you, Vanya, a small man came from the banks of the Neva to Rome and at once raised chaos in the Vatican." The painting hung in the Vatican Museums for some decades. At some point in the mid-nineteenth century, although the precise year is not recorded in any published source, it was transferred to the Mekhitarist Armenian Catholic monastery on the island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni in the Venetian Lagoon. Aivazovsky's elder brother Gabriel had taken vows there. The painting remains in the monastery's picture gallery to this day. Critics see Chaos as the first of Aivazovsky's biblical seascapes and as the work that brought him a European reputation while he was still a student abroad.
Also on this shelf
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George Caleb Bingham.
See also
Uncatalogued shelfText from Wikipedia; plate via Wikimedia Commons. Text CC BY-SA 4.0; plate freely licensed (see Commons). Source record. Images and catalogue data are reproduced from open-access collections.