Portraits In the Archive of the Foreign College In The Late 18th – Early 19th Century As a Means of Its Officials’ Self-Representation
This paper deals with a collection of portraits that used to be located at the Moscow Archive of the College of Foreign Affairs and has not previously attracted attention of scholars. The Archive's administrator Nikolai Bantysh-Kamenskii began putting this collection together in the 1780s on. The portraits presented all the heads of Posol'skii prikaz and the College of Foreign Affairs beginning from the 1660s. The portraits were placed in the Archive's chambers and served to visually represent the involvement of Archive's administrators in the highest politics of the empire. At the same time, creating this gallery involved the mechanics used a decade earlier by Catherine II as she worked on setting up the gallery at the Chesme Palace. Whereas she supplied her gallery with a literary description, the secretary of the Archive Aleksei Malinovskii composed the biographies of the administrators portrayed at the Archive's gallery – from Afanasii Ordyn-Nashchokin to Mikhail Vorontsov. The composition of the manuscript, subsequently presented to the emperor Alexander I, echoed the structure of the gallery as it existed in the 1780s – the decade which was a turning point in the Archive's institutional development, and in Aleksei Malinovskii's career as well