The Brazen Serpent (Bruni)

The Brazen Serpent is a giant painting by the Russian artist of Italian origin Fyodor Bruni (1799-1875), completed in 1841. It is part of the collection of the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg.

The size of the painting is 565×852 cm. Bruni's inspiration for the painting was a story described in the Old Testament about how the Jewish people, led out of Egypt by the prophet Moses, began to lose faith and murmur after years of wandering in the stony desert. This led to God's punishment — a rain of poisonous snakes to save them from the deadly bites of a brazen serpent.

Bruni worked on this painting for about fifteen years: he informed the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts that he had begun work on the large painting in February 1827, and completed it in 1841. In 1833-1836 he worked in Italy, then he was called back to Saint Petersburg to teach at the Imperial Academy of Arts, and in 1838 he returned to Rome, where he completed the painting. The painting was sent to Russia in the summer of 1841, after a successful exhibition in Rome.

It was exhibited in the Winter Palace and after a while it was transferred to the Academy of Arts. From the very beginning, "The Brazen Serpent" was often compared with Karl Bryullov's large-format painting "The Last Day of Pompeii", which appeared seven years earlier - later, both paintings were exhibited side by side in the Hermitage and the Russian Museum; they were called "colossi of Russian painting". The surface of the canvas is about 48 m⁲, the weight of the canvas is about 70 kg.

It is considered to be the largest Russian history painting, the largest painting in the collection of the State Russian Museum, and the largest among easel paintings of the first half of the 19th century.