Fyodor Bruni

It took Fyodor Bruni more than 15 years to finish a single painting. The Brazen Serpent, a biblical scene of Israelites dying of snakebite in the desert, is a wall of a canvas, well over 5 metres tall and 8 across. He made the first sketch in 1824 and completed it only around 1841, working by turns in Rome and Saint Petersburg.

Bruni was Russian by career and Italian by birth. Born in Milan in 1799 as Fidelio Bruni, he was the son of a Swiss-Italian decorative painter who had moved the family to Russia around 1800 for court work. The boy entered the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg at ten and graduated at nineteen. When The Brazen Serpent finally reached the capital, Tsar Nicholas I bought it, and viewers measured it against Karl Bryullov's vast Last Day of Pompeii, the reigning showpiece of Russian history painting.

Bruni spent his later years as an institution more than a painter. He worked on the interior of St Isaac's Cathedral, took charge of the Hermitage picture gallery from 1849, and became rector of painting and sculpture at the Academy in the mid-1850s. By the end he was the keeper of an old grand manner that a younger, more realist generation was pushing hard against, and he gave up his Academy post in 1871, four years before his death in Saint Petersburg.