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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;2manybooks, post: 10783172, member: 8267&quot;]For those of us who do not read Russian -</p><p><br /></p><p>&quot;The Russian tsars revered this ancient art. According to the minutes of the Supreme Privy Council, Empress Catherine I kept her personal belongings in two Kholmogory chests. It is reliably known that chess sets were repeatedly purchased from the Kholmogory carver Osip Dudin for the heir to the royal throne, Grand Duke Pavel Petrovich. In 1798, the royal couple Pavel I and Maria Feodorovna received from the carver N. S. Vereshchagin, who lived for long periods in both Arkhangelsk and St. Petersburg, a pair of cone-shaped vases, which are now kept in the State Hermitage.</p><p><br /></p><p>The works of N. S. Vereshchagin exhibited features associated with the advent of the new artistic classicism. This is the strict graphic style of the carving era, the special elegance of the geometrical ornament in contrast to the whimsical curls of the Rococo. Lush colorfulness, as one of the features of the design of carved bone of the 18th century, gradually is replaced by the cold and strict beauty of the art of the next century. The shell-shaped curls typical of the Rococo style give way to a strictly patterned ornament, and the complex forms of the products of the Kholmogory carvers of the last century are replaced by simpler ones. It is Having become a first-class master, Osip Dudin followed in the footsteps of his fellow countryman and moved to St. Petersburg. Dudin earned his first money in the capital not without the help of Lomonosov. Mikhail Vasilyevich convinced the Academy of Sciences to buy a large mammoth tusk from the bone carver for laboratory research. Osip Dudin did not have to wait long for orders either - the advertisements placed in the &quot;Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti&quot; worked. The master made many masterpieces for high society. The heir to the throne, Pavel Petrovich, the future Emperor Paul I, played with his mammoth bone chess. Osip Dudin, commissioned by the Solovetsky Monastery, carved a cup into the ornament of which he mounted 58 medallions with portraits of Russian rulers, from Rurik to Catherine II. Later, already a 70-year-old elder, the master followed his masterpiece to the Solovetsky Monastery, retiring from worldly affairs and taking monastic vows.</p><p><br /></p><p>The great Russian sculptor Fedot Ivanovich Shubin, the son of Lomonosov&#039;s first mentor, Ivan Shubny, also started out as a carver in Kurostrov. In 1759, again with a fish convoy, Fedot left for St. Petersburg. Lomonosov arranged for his fellow countryman to attend the Academy of Arts in the class of the French sculptor Gillet. Fedot Shubin graduated from the Academy with a Grand Gold Medal, after which he went to study in Paris and Rome.</p><p><br /></p><p>The ideal image of Russian enlightenment in the 18th century is a symphony of the secular and the spiritual. However, at the end of the 19th century, Kholmogory carving fell into decline, and the last&quot;</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Note that this excerpt says &quot;the future Emperor Paul I, played with his <u>mammoth bone</u> chess&quot;.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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