The Prince

The exhibition will include 40 original illustrations made by Rashid Dominov to the collection of Niccolo Machiavelli's works for  "Vita Nova" publishing house. After the famous work of Rashid Dominov - his illustrations for the cycle of Dante's sonnets for Beatrice ("La Vita Nuova") - the artist addresses the Renaissance theme again. But this time he looks at Florence not through the eyes of a poet in love, but through the eyes of a pragmatic strategist and rational thinker. "To do without characters and without human figures in general, to build in architectural and landscape fractures compositions for the spectator's guessing, while keeping the reader in Machiavelli's Florence, was my main task", - Rashid Dominov says. 

In the artistic atmosphere of the Renaissance, Dominov managed to show plastically the elements of destructiveness, anxiety and the coming disaster. In the harmonious views and the interiors of Florence a feeling of fracture and violation of harmony is created. 

Dominov is a man of the theater. He designed more than thirty performances in theaters in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Astrakhan, Tomsk, Tula, Kazan. He made illustrations not only to Machiavelli's play "The Mandrake", included in the collection of his works, but also to the political works of the author - this is the theater, the stage, the scenery in which the action unfolds. 

Machiavelli's glory is a special one. He was praised as a great patriot and a prophet of national revival, and cursed as a mentor of tyrants and a destroyer of moral values. He became almost a household name. All treacherous tyrants, from Catherine de Medici to Hitler and Stalin, were considered Machiavelli's direct disciples. Meanwhile, not everything is so scary in the heritage of the first European political scientist: politicians, sociologists and historians constantly refer to his calm, sometimes ruthless lessons.  

In 1546, it was declared among the participants of the Council of Trent that "the hand of Satan" had written "The Prince". Apparently, Machiavelli knew something about the nature of one of the main human instincts - the will to power - that you can learn only by making a pact with the Devil. From 1559, all his works were included in the first Catholic "Index of Forbidden books". 

"There were so many moralists who threw the most bitter reproaches and the most serious accusations in the face of mankind, but mankind was not offended by anyone as much as by Machiavelli. So deeply, so deadly you can be offended only by the truth", - Mikhail Andreev, a literary critic, author of the article and comments to the book, writes. Andreev proves that Machiavelli was far beyond his common reputation. Only by giving him an intent look, we can comprehend what the Renaissance individualism was, and understand what the Renaissance aestheticism was. This is what, in fact, Rashid Dominov did, illustrating Europe's first political treatise, the cheerful erotic comedy and the letters of a calm, sober thinker of the Renaissance in Italy. Dominov's illustrations are the same comment to the book, as Andreev's comment, only visual. And besides this, they (as always with Rashid Dominov's illustrations) are beautiful.

About the artist.

Rashid Raufovich Dominov is a famous painter, graphic artist, illustrator, theater artist. Honored artist of Russia. He was born in 1946 in Astrakhan. In 1966, he graduated from the secondary art  school, in 1972 graduated from Ilya Repin St. Petersburg State Academic Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (the Studio of theater-decorative painting).

Participant of more than 300 Saint Petersburg, All-Russian and international exhibitions. Winner of B. Kustodiev Republican Prize. Member of the Union of Artists of Russia, member of St. Petersburg Academy of Modern Art.

Rashid Dominov's works are kept in the State Russian Museum, Georgian Museum of Fine Arts, State Museum of the History of Saint Petersburg, Saint Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music, Anna Akhmatova Museum in the Fountain House,  State Museum of Political History of Russia; in art galleries of Astrakhan, Barnaul, Volgograd, Vologda, Voronezh, Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Petrozavodsk, Tomsk, Khabarovsk, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, as well as in private collections in Russia, Germany, France, Finland, Sweden and other countries.

About the publishing house.

"Vita Nova" publishing house was established in Saint Petersburg in 2000. It specializes in publishing the collectible illustrated books of limited circulation. Famous Russian and foreign painters, literary critics and art historians take part in book production. The books of the publishing house are presented in the collections of the State Hermitage, State Russian Museum, Russian Academy of Arts, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, in other Russian and foreign museum and private collections. "Vita Nova" publishing house has more than 60 book diplomas and awards, including several top Russian book awards, among which is Grand Prix of "The Book of the Year" contest.

www.vitanova.ru