Mirror image compared to the finished painting "The Apparition of Christ Before the People". 1833–1857, State Tretyakov Gallery
The studies by Alexander Ivanov for the painting The Coming of the Messiah are a unique artistic world. There are thousands of studies, and each of them are an independent, internally perfect, finished work, and sometimes the subject does not depend on the main painting, but it always pre¬serves connected with its ideas and aesthetics. Types, certain groups and visual motifs are repeated many times, revealing searches for emotional formulas. For example, the middle group in the foreground is an "old man and a boy rising up out of the water", and they were the subject of no less than six studies.
