Gheorghe Asachi - Contribution To Visual Arts

Contribution To Visual Arts

As a teacher, Asachi assisted and encouraged the development of Romanian art. Before he came to exercise his influence, Moldavian art was essentially dependent on boyar patronage, and, by the turn of the 18th century, had come to focus on portrait painting. Asachi centered his energies on introducing Romantic nationalist themes and popularizing new trends. He integrated painting, architecture, and drawing and oil painting in classes taught at Academia Mihăileană (called class de zugrăvie, an antiquated version of "painting course"), and introduced lithography through the means of his printing press.

In the 1830s and 1840s, he encouraged artists the copying and publishing of paintings and drawings with historical themes. Asachi emphasized the educational aspects of zugrăvitura istorică în oloiu ("history painting in oil"), and intended its creations to reach as wide an audience as possible. In this respect as well, his contributions were equivalent to those of Heliade Rădulescu, who opened the first museum in Wallachia (1837).

The resulting works are generally naïve in quality, and inaccurate in their reconstruction of historical scenes. Gheorghe Panaiteanu Bardasare, the recipient of a scholarship to the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, was the only one of his many disciples to remain under the influence of Asachi's tenets for the rest of his life, developing these into academic art. Asachi's disciples also included Gheorghe Lemeni, who studied in Munich and Rome, and the minor artist Gheorghe Năstăseanu.

Arguably, Asachi's most important contribution to the artistic field was his involvement in attracting foreign painters to the Moldavian scene, by offering them commissions or educational assignments; among these were the Polish Ludwik Stawski and Mauriciu Loeffler, the Italian Giovanni Schiavoni, as well as the Austrian Josef Adler (noted for authoring an 1833 manual for landscape painting and still life works) and Ioan Müller (who taught figurative art). Of them, Asachi reportedly considered Schiavoni to be the most competent, while he tended to replace most others after reexamining their skills. Another important Italian artist who arrived in Iaşi during that period was the former Carboneria revolutionary Niccoló Livaditti, to whom Asachi did not, however, assign a teaching post. In 1843, four years before the Iaşi Academia was radically transformed, the art classes were disestablished due to the protest of various boyars (who objected to the fact that members of all social groups could attend them).

Gheorghe Asachi's own works, many of which date back to the time he spent in Rome, show the influence of Classicism. Noted for their rigorous use of artistic conventions and nature study, they are nonetheless considered inferior to both their creator's contributions to other cultural fields and the works of other many painters active in Moldavia at the time. Asachi himself is known to have sketched out works which were completed by his foreign collaborators or students (among these is a since-lost painting of Stephen the Great facing his mother, signed by the Italian artist Giani, and an 1845 painting of Moldavians in the battle of Malbork Castle). A series of Classicist drawings from the early decades of the 19th century have only tentatively been attributed to Asachi.