Like the giants of the Renaissance period, Mikhail Vrubel, a major Russian Symbolist and Art Nouveau master, was richly talented. He displayed his artistic abilities in various ways: he painted large-scale pictures and monumental panels, drew virtuosically, illustrated the classics of Russian literature and proved to be a talented sculptor and set designer; he was successful in his sallies into architecture, fashion design and printmaking. An elevated spirituality characterises the portraits that he painted of his contemporaries, works that are imbued with Russian and classical mythology and classical literature. A happy fate befell the master's artistic legacy: having once been a powerful influence on contemporaries, it never lost its relevance over time. The paintings Girl with a Persian Carpet in the Background, The Demon (Seated), The Swan Princess, his illustrations to the works of Mikhail Lermontov and compositions imbued with images from Alexander Pushkin (Prophet and Six-Winged Seraph) have become part of the golden treasury of Russian culture.
