Fedor Gordeev

Born 1744 in Tsarskoe Selo (?), the present-day city of Pushkin; died on Jan. 23 (Feb. 4). 1810, in St. Petersburg. Russian sculptor; the son of a cattle-yard worker.

Gordeev studied in the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts with N. F. Gillet (1759–67), in Paris with J. B. Lemoyne (1767–72), and in Rome. In 1776 he became an academician, in 1782 professor, and in 1802 rector of the Academy of Arts. His early work Prometheus (plaster of Paris. 1769, Tret’iakov Gallery; bronze. Russian Museum in Leningrad) is composed dramatically in the baroque spirit and modeled in a tensely expressive manner. Later he strove for the simplicity, lucidity, and serenity characteristic of classic art.

Gordeev’s reliefs were marked by fine plastic elaboration forming soft variations of light and shade and were marked by a majestic rhythmic grace (they were modeled for the facades and interiors of the Ostankin Palace in Moscow, 1794–98, and for the facades of the Kazan Cathedral in Leningrad. 1804–07). The same qualities were evinced in his elegiac marble tombstones (for N. M. Golitsyna, 1780. D. M. Golitsyn. 1799, both in the A. V. Shchusev Scientific Research Museum of Architecture in Moscow, and A. M. Golitsyn, 1788. in the Museum of Urban Sculpture, Leningrad). Gordeev directed the casting of bronze statues for the fountains of Peterhof (today’s Petrodvorets) and the installation of the monument to Peter I by E. M. Falconet, and the monument to A. V. Suvorov by M. I. Kozlovskii in St. Petersburg.