A massive marble vase covered with malachite veneer; tiny nails on tiny shoes on a tiny metalwork flea. In this talk Molly Brunson will discuss the very big and the very small objects that came to be associated with the Russian empire during the long nineteenth century, moving from the malachite boom in the Ural Mountains to the century’s legendary world’s fairs and Nikolai Leskov’s tale of a Tula artisan. By situating these examples from the Russian decorative arts within the history of resource extraction and hardstone mining, industrial development, and global competition, Brunson shows how these marvelous objects leveraged scale to reflect and possibly control the earth-shattering impacts of modern industry.
