Allegorical scene

Allegorical Scene by Konstantin Makovsky represents his engagement with the Western tradition of decorative allegorical painting that he absorbed through his academic training and his extensive travel in Western Europe. The allegorical mode was somewhat at odds with the social realism and historical nationalism that defined the dominant strands of Russian painting in the second half of the nineteenth century, making Makovsky's excursions into allegory a marker of his more cosmopolitan artistic identity. He had extensive personal contact with French academic painters during his Paris sojourns and was influenced by the decorative Neo-Rococo and neo-Renaissance styles that were fashionable in French academic circles during the 1870s and 1880s.

Canvas support with the lighter, more decorative handling appropriate to an allegorical subject. Makovsky's academic training gave him full command of the conventions of the mode — idealized figures, mythological attributes, carefully composed color harmonies — that he could deploy with confident facility.