10.6092/issn.1973-9494/7955
The figure and work of Michail Vasil’evic Lomonosov are significantly and emblematically synonymous with interdisciplinarity and internationalization in one personality. It is evident from what has been described and noted in the various bibliographic sources that have been consulted, highlighting Lomonosov’s extreme versatility and, at the same time, his intense activity and interest in the various humanities and experimental sciences.
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Aleksandre P. Lobodanov
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The Versatile Figure of Michail Vasil'evič Lomonosov
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Aleksandre P. Lobodanov
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Department of Semiotics and Basic Theory of Fine Arts, Faculty of Arts, Lomonosov State University, Moscow
1973-9494
internationalization
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Nekrasova, E.A (1988). <em>Lomonosov-chudojnik</em> [Lomonosov-artist]. Moskva.
The Versatile Figure of Michail Vasil'evič Lomonosov
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17
    On the occasion of the Meeting “Memory becomes future”, between the Academia
delle Scienze dell’Istituto di Bologna and the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences,
held in Bologna 25th-26th October 2016, the ceremony took place for the nomination of
Professor Alexandre P. Lobodanov as Foreign Member of the Academia delle Scienze
dell’Istituto di Bologna. The fundamental aim of this Meeting was directed at establish-
ing and consolidating the scientiic collaboration between these two Academies and
conirming the importance of the Sciences as the synergy of the Natural and Social
Sciences, in relation to the different themes of environmental safety and the protec-
tion and valorization of cultural heritage. In a signiicant way, it represented the two
keywords on which this Journal is founded, namely, interdisciplinarity and internation-
alization.
    These are emblematically also the conceptual terms expressed by Professor Lo-
bodanov in his presentation on the occasion of this εeeting regarding the igure and
activity of Michail Vasil’evic Lomonosov, “a genius in the history of human culture”. At
the same time, the signiicant message inherent in this intervention, testiies to the
laudable work carried out by Professor Lobadonov with his teaching and as Dean of
the Faculty of Arts and Director of the Department of Semeiotics and Basic Theory of
Fine Arts, at Lomonosov Moscow State University.
    In fact, he highlights the importance of the history which establishes the identities
born of the past, as well as underlining the need for experimentation for the numerous
and problematic issues in the sector of the protection and valorization of cultural and
environmental heritage.
                                                                          Editor-in-Chief
     HE VERSATILE FIGURE OF MICHAIL VASIL’EVIČ
T    LOMONOSOV

   Aleksandre P. Lobodanov*13A.P
   Department of Semiotics and Basic Theory of Fine Arts, Faculty of Arts
   Lomonosov State University Moscow, Russia


   Keywords: genius, interdisciplinarity, internationalization



   “Speaking about Lomonosov gives pleasure, a pleasure that comes from communi-
cating with one of the original geniuses in the history of human culture” wrote the great
Russian philosopher, Sergei Vavilov [1]. Today, speaking about δomonosov is dificult,
because it is dificult to ind something new to say about δomonosov’s life and scientiic
activities, as they have been the subject of scrupulous study for more than 250 years.
His enormous inluence on the development of Russian culture, the human sciences
and nature, education, language and literature, has been universally acknowledged.
   It is customary to deine characters of this caliber “men who made an era”. δomono-
sov anticipated, by a long time, many of his contemporaries in scientiic, philosophical
and humanistic maturity. His European grounding, along with his talent for seeing and
being open to new things, gave him the opportunity to become what he is for Russia
today – Russia’s irst world-class scientist.
   A Russian philosopher of the twentieth century, Vasily Rozanov, wrote that “Lo-
monosov’s genius, together with all his activities, contained an entire method, even




                                                                                                   CONSERVATION SCIENCE IN CULTURAL HERITAGE
though he neither mentioned it, nor built a theory from it [2].” Today, we turn to Lomono-
sov’s multi-faceted igure in this evocative Bolognese environment not only to remem-
ber that this remarkable scientist and humanist, was called to become a member of
the Academy in 1764. We recall δomonosov’s scientiic legacy in order to highlight the
method that consolidated the foundation for all his scientiic and artistic creation, and
that has come to fruition in current study and research: interdisciplinarity.
   The interdisciplinarity that characterized all Lomonosov’s research, also determined
his perception of the world and relected his ideas on its unity. In his opinion, different
ields of knowledge describe different aspects of a single world. In an encomiastic
song, in honor of Empress Elizabeth, the daughter of Peter the Great, Lomonosov
shows his own perception of this unity in poetic form:

      Astronomy opens up to us the universe created by God, physics shows us all
   the visible world, while geography presents the vastness of the orbit terrarum to
   human reason, history and poetry serve to describe the historical acts of humans,
   philosophy holds the human intellect, medicine cares for people’s health, while
   knowledge of the intrinsic structure of things gives us chemistry, and mechanics
   shows us the means to build and use different machines and apparatus; with all



* Corresponding author: alobodanov@inbox.ru

                                                                                             183
                                                                             this, concludes Lomonosov, all the sciences are held together by the precise and
                                                                             cautious Mathematics1.

                                                                              Lomonosov was born at the height of Peter I’s reforms, when Russian culture re-
                                                                          ceived a decisive impetus, pushing it in the direction of European art and science. It
                                                                          was at this time that the discovery of man’s personality came about, relecting itself in
                                                                          philosophical and civilian ideas, in literature and art. For example, it was at the time of
                                                                          Peter the Great, alongside the secular tradition of the iconographic representation of
                                                                          Saints, that in Russian art portraiture began to spread.
                                                                              The discovery of this personality started with recognizing his value simply as a man,
                                                                          without considering his origin, faith, and social condition. δomonosov himself conirms
                                                                          this. Prior to Peter I’s reforms, a man’s role was deined by society and the authorities,
                                                                          according to his belonging to the nobility, while personal qualities (intelligence, educa-
                                                                          tion) were hardly even taken into account; in the early eighteenth century, the opposite
                                                                          was true, his role was increasingly deined in relation to what he had learned and what
                                                                          he could do. Thus, after years of working at the Academy of Sciences in St. Peters-
                                                                          burg, Lomonosov, the son of a peasant, received hereditary nobility.
                                                                              The concept of person, understood as an individual with an independent position in
                                                                          each ield, involving great commitment of their intelligence and spirit, became a con-
                                                                          quest for the culture of the New Russia, and Lomonosov contributed extraordinarily to
A.P. Lobodanov - The versatile figure of Michail Vasil’evič Lomonosov




                                                                          its development.
                                                                              δomonosov’s life embraces the irst half and middle period of the eighteenth cen-
                                                                          turyμ he was born into a peasant family (his father was a isherman) on the northern
                                                                          banks of the White Sea in 1711 and died in 1765 in St. Petersburg. Driven by an inex-
                                                                          haustible impulse to study Latin (the language of science at that time) and nature in all
                                                                          its forms, the young nineteen-year-old, on a cold winter night, secretly left his paternal
                                                                          home on foot, to follow a caravan of ishermen with its load of goods, from his native
                                                                          village to Moscow.
                                                                              He reached the ancient Russian capital in 1731 and began to attend the Slavic
                                                                          Greek Latin Academy. Lomonosov, who belonged neither to the nobility nor ecclesiasti-
                                                                          cal circle, did not really have the right to study at this academy. He even passed himself
                                                                          off, at times, as the son of a nobleman, and other times as a priest. It was disastrous
                                                                          when the truth came to light: it meant the prospect of being enlisted (which at that time
                                                                          meant being a soldier for life) or exile in Siberia. Lomonosov escaped this fate thanks
                                                                          to his extraordinary skills in arithmetic, ancient Slavic grammar and the Sacred Scrip-
                                                                          ture, subjects he had learned alone with the books given to him by the village parish
                                                                          priest. The person who personally examined him, was an eminent ecclesiastical oficial
                                                                          of the time, Feofan Procopovich, curator of the Academy. Distinguishing himself in his
                                                                          studies, in 1735 he was invited to continue his education at the Academy of Sciences
                                                                          in St. Petersburg and in 1736 from there he was sent to study chemistry, metallurgy
                                                                          and mining in Germany. He was in Marburg at the time Kristian Wolf taught there and
                                                                          it was he who formed the scientiic ideas and the enlightening vision of the future sci-
                                                                          entist.
                                                                              When he returned to St. Petersburg in 1741, δomonosov began his scientiic career
                                                                          as an “adjunct” in physics, an academic assistant at the Department of Physical Sci-
                                                                          ences. In 1745 he was promoted to professor of chemistry at the Academy of Sciences
                                                                          of St. Petersburg, which at that period in time meant he had been appointed as an
                                                                          academic.


                                                                    184
Figure 1. Mikhail Lomonosov. E. Fassard from the original by A.K. Wortmann. Burin engraving on
paper, 1757 (private collection).

    Lomonosov’s thoughts possessed a rare power of synthesis: he could make inter-
disciplinary connections and draw together phenomena that generally seemed unre-
lated. He had his own original solution for each scientiic question, however new for
him and always introduced some additional idea of his own.
    The core discipline of δomonosov’s natural sciences was physics, which deined his




                                                                                                       CONSERVATION SCIENCE IN CULTURAL HERITAGE
conception of the world as a scientist. He greatly contributed to the formulation of a ki-
netic-molecular theory on heat. The theory is directly connected to the atomic-molecular
concept of matter, in opposition to the materialistic atomism of Descartes and Newton.
    At the same time, he laid the foundations for a kinetic theory on gases, primarily of the
air. In his research he was active in several ields of physicsμ he studied the liquid, solid
and gaseous state of bodies, working on thermometry. His experiments in electricity,
continued by Franklin, led him to an interesting hypothesis on the nature of the electric
load in clouds; for this purpose, he designed and built a kind of lightning rod which he
called the “thunder machine.” He also studied the origin of light according to a new theory
of colors, the cause of heat and cold, the movement of air observed in mines, atmos-
pheric effects caused by electric forces. He also studied the aurora borealis and eclipses.
    In the ield of chemistry, a science that was almost in its primordial stages at the
time, Lomonosov had investigated the generation of metals resulting from the earth’s
movements, the coloration of metals, solids and liquids in general, the action ofchemi-
cal solutions.
    In the ield of astronomy, it was he who made the discovery of Venus’s atmosphere.
Observing in 1761 a rare phenomenon (the passage of Venus in front of the Sun), he
noticed the deformation and blurry appearance of the margins of the planet’s disk and
was the irst to infer that Venus must have an atmosphere. The same demonstration
was carried out 121 years later, when Venus again passed in front of the Sun.


                                                                                                 185
                                                                          Figure 2. View of the Academy of Science of St. Petersburg. Engraving by G.A. Kačalov and E.G.
                                                                          Vinogradov after the drawing by M.I. Mahaev. Paper, etching, burin engraving, watercolor, 1753
                                                                          (Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia).
A.P. Lobodanov - The versatile figure of Michail Vasil’evič Lomonosov




                                                                             Lomonosov’s most important achievement was the experimental demonstration of
                                                                          the principle of conservation of mass. In 1756 he performed a classic experiment, dem-
                                                                          onstrating that in a hermetically sealed phial the mass of metals do not vary through
                                                                          the action of heat; the experiment was repeated seventeen years later by Lavoisier.
                                                                             In the ield of human sciences δomonosov excelled no less than in nature. Dur-
                                                                          ing his stay in Germany he had acquired a vast humanistic culture, which led him to
                                                                          deal with poetry, philology, Russian and Slavic grammar, dramaturgy. As a student in
                                                                          Freiburg, Lomonosov sent the Academy his δetter on the rules of Russian versiication
                                                                          written to justify the tonic verses introduced in his Ode to the victory of Chotin, which
                                                                          accompanied the afore-mentioned letter. The Ode was an exceptional success at the
                                                                          Russian Court, contrasting syllabic versiication for good. The preface to The useful-
                                                                          ness of ecclesiastical books in the Russian language of 1757, “can be said to be the
                                                                          irst on Russian style, owing to the application of the three styles of classical theory
                                                                          (high, middle and low) both in language and literature.”
                                                                             The subject matter in much of the poetic work written by the poet-scientist can be
                                                                          described as an explanation of the sciences of nature and the exaltation of the great-
                                                                          ness of God the creator. “And in describing the Nordic phenomenon of the meteor as
                                                                          a scientist, but contemplating it as a poet”, Pietro Cazzola writes, “he also recognizes
                                                                          the immeasurable greatness of God, then humbly invokes:

                                                                                 “O Creatore! a me chiuso dalla tenebra
                                                                                 dona la luce della saggezza
                                                                                 e quanto dinanzi a Te è buono
                                                                                 insegnami ognora a creare,
                                                                                 e guardando alla Tua creatura,
                                                                                 a lodarti, o Re immortale [3].”



                                                                    186
    With a long tradition of dealing with the history of Russian antiquities from an eccle-
siastical point of view, δomonosov was the irst to write a secular history of Russia. Of
his authorship is a fundamental work, Russian history, posthumous and uninished, of
which only the irst volume appeared in 1766, followed immediately by the German and
French versions. During the life of the scientist, in the years 1760-1761, three consecu-
tive editions of the Short Russian Chronicle were published, which was immediately
translated into German and English. It chronologically lists all the Russian princes and
tsars, with a brief description of the main events of their reign. In the following decades,
this book served as a Russian history textbook for young people: written in the form of
an explanatory drawing, the book presented events and historical episodes that were
consecutively connected to each other, in order to facilitate its memorization.
    I would also like to recall Lomonosov’s work on Voltaire’s manuscript Histoire de
l’Empire russe sous Pierre le Grand, given to him by Count Šuvalov, his protector, on
whose initiative the French philosopher had begun to compose this work. Lomono-
sov commented the irst eight chapters of the manuscript, accompanying the text with
detailed notes. In addition to Voltaire’s work, the Russian historian drafted a rough
copy about the strel’cy revolts (the Russian Musketeers) at the time of Zarina Sophia,
Peter’s older sister. A comparative analysis of the two texts shows that the French
philosopher has incorporated Lomonosov’s comments to a large extent in his work: in
the fourth chapter Voltaire narrates the story of the rebellions according to the Russian
text, and in the ifth chapter describes the story of the government of Soia, reproduc-
ing Lomonosov’s work almost word for word. It was in this way, thanks to the transla-
tions of Lomonosov’s historical works and to the publication of Voltaire’s book, that
European intellectuals were able to learn about Russian history [4].
    Even Lomonosov’s historical research reveal his interdisciplinary method: history
as the basis of art. Thus, the Short Russian Chronicle became the basis for develop-
ing and creating a series of commemorative medals of Russian princes and tsars.
The recto of each medal portrayed the bust of a prince or a tsar, with a circular pattern




                                                                                                       CONSERVATION SCIENCE IN CULTURAL HERITAGE
of writing containing his name and title. On the verso appeared a quotation from the
text of the Short Russian Chronicle, which summarized the main events of the reign
of the person depicted. Lomonosov himself designed the recto of the medal At the
founding of the leet, representing a half-igure of Peter I dressed in armor and holding
Neptune’s trident. Up to 1776, 57 medals were produced, starting from Rjurikino and
up to the Empress Elizabeth. Throughout the nineteenth century, this series of medals
was among the most popular educational material found in almost every high school.
    Lomonosov conceived these medals as a historical ‘monument’. The representation
of the old Russian princes on the recto of the medals was, inevitably, conventional be-
cause no authentic representations of them existed. It should be noted that long before
the creation of the series of historic medals, Lomonosov had turned to the Academy of
Sciences with the initiative (October 18, 1760) which involved sending painters of the
Academy of Fine Arts to the capitals of the ancient Russian principalities to copy the
oldest ecclesiastical images of the princes reproduced in icons, frescoes, and graves.
In addition to making these copies, the painters had to collect the genealogical data
preserved in the ecclesiastical iconography: “Moreover ... in all the churches where the
princes’ tombs are found ... correctly copy the inscriptions from the lapidary,” he wrote.
    Lomonosov attributed great importance to iconography in the study of history: he re-
peatedly turned to igures from historical events in the igurative arts. The idea of interdis-
ciplinarity is quite evident here: chemistry and history considered as the foundation for art.


                                                                                                 187
                                                                             When I think of Lomonosov’s pictorial work, I see an evocative phenomenon in the
                                                                          history of Russian art. The mosaic pictures produced by Lomonosov together with his
                                                                          chemistry associates, played an innovative role in 18th-century Russian culture by reviv-
                                                                          ing the art of mosaic composition, which had been lost in Russia after the 19th century.
                                                                             In the ield of igurative arts, his talent as a chemist joined that of a painter’s mas-
                                                                          tery: the recipe for enamel and the technology for its production and that of the welding
                                                                          solution, which he elaborated in his chemistry laboratory, enabled him to create in his
                                                                          workshop of mosaics, original works of art.
                                                                             The famous chemistry laboratory he founded in St. Petersburg was the irst Russian
                                                                          establishment of its kind for scientiic and pedagogical purposes in this ield. δomono-
                                                                          sov considered chemistry his main profession. As a true scientist, he combined the
                                                                          thinker with the experimenter; in the study of nature, just like Leonardo he preferred
                                                                          experience. His chemistry experiments were useful and necessary not only for the
                                                                          progress of science, but also for “the growth of the arts,” as he wrote in his memo ad-
                                                                          dressed to the Russian Academy.
                                                                             The methods used by δomonosov in the ield of mosaic art were different from the
                                                                          methods and the characteristic objectives of the Roman mosaic masters of the 17th and
                                                                          18th century, who used colored enamels to make copies of oil paintings.
                                                                             The work produced in Lomonosov’s workshop was distinguished by a concise and
                                                                          vivid execution of the artistic idea, the generalization of the whole composition and
A.P. Lobodanov - The versatile figure of Michail Vasil’evič Lomonosov




                                                                          the expressiveness of the individual shapes, the intensity and saturation of the chro-
                                                                          matic contrasts. In short, all the objects were distinguished by the decorative style of
                                                                          their execution. In transferring oil works to mosaic, Lomonosov provided for their long-
                                                                          distance visual perception, which inluenced the exalted and grandiose style of his
                                                                          mosaics, consistent with the goals of monumental painting.
                                                                             Most of his mosaics were created in the genre of the portrait. Among the mosa-
                                                                          ics, two made by Lomonosov himself have been preserved: the Salvatore Acheropita
                                                                          (1753, preserved in the Historical Museum of Moscow) and the Portrait of Peter the
                                                                          Great reproduced from the original by G. Tanhauer (1754, housed in the Hermitage
                                                                          Museum). Of the forty mosaic works carried out in the workshop he directed, twenty-
                                                                          three of them have been preserved [5].




                                                                                                                       Figure 3. Portrait of Peter the
                                                                                                                       Great, from the original by G.
                                                                                                                       Tanhauer. 1754 (Hermitage
                                                                                                                       Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia).




                                                                    188
    The world-renowned masterpiece by Lomonosov’s workshop is in fact the Battle
of Poltava (1762-1764, the Academy of Sciences building in St. Petersburg), the irst
Russian mosaic of great dimensions with a historical theme. A majestic idea, created in
a decorative style, which corresponded to Lomonosov’s main objective: to glorify Peter
I and his memorable victories.
    The concept of interdisciplinarity laid the foundations for the irst Russian university,
created by Lomonosov (and after whom the University of Moscow is rightly named, for
having promoted its institution in 1755). Although the capital of the Russian Empire
was St. Petersburg, the ancient capital of Moscow was chosen as the location of Lo-
monosov’s project, as it represented the center of Russia’s historical and cultural heri-
tage. Lomonosov, moreover, in his Russian Grammar, had taken Moscow’s spoken
language as a model for literary language; a model that was not only intermediate due
to its geographical location, wrote Lomonosov, but also central by virtue of Moscow’s
historic importance.




                                                                                                     CONSERVATION SCIENCE IN CULTURAL HERITAGE
Figure 4. Battle of Poltava, 1762-1764, mosaic, Academy of the Sciences of St. Petersburg,
Russia.

   The University of Moscow today carries Lomonosov’s name and is not merely a trib-
ute; the University continues the work of its founder, namely the education of Russia,
the afirmation of the priority of scientiic knowledge, the development and enrichment
of Russian culture and art. The University of Moscow is the source and interpreter of
the genius of the Russian nation and its people, the personiication of Russia’s history
and future destiny. In the same way the creation of the Cremlin architectural complex
in Moscow marks the end of the process of creating a united Russian state, the foun-
dation of the Moscow University marks the beginning of the rise of Russian science.
Lomonosov not only founded a university, but was himself, as our great poet Puškin
said, a university with life.
   δomonosov was not well- known in the European scientiic community of the 1800s
and 1900s, and even today it cannot be said that he is better known. Thus, a chemistry


                                                                                               189
                                                                          historian, the Frenchman F. Hoefer, curiously wrote in 1860: «Parmi les chimistes
                                                                          russes qui se sont fait connaître comme chimistes, nous citerons Michel Lomonossov,
                                                                          qu’il ne faut pas confondre avec le poète de ce nom”. Even during Lomonosov’s life,
                                                                          moreover, his scientiic research was not understood by the Imperial Court oficialsμ he
                                                                          was appreciated irst and foremost as a poet. For an encomiastic song, in honor of the
                                                                          Empress Elizabeth, Lomonosov received two thousand rubles from the sovereign - a
                                                                          sum that exceeded three times the annuity of his academic salary. Puškin, who had
                                                                          understood Lomonosov’s character very well, wrote in 1834 that, “Lomonosov person-
                                                                          ally did not think much of his own poems and paid much more attention to his chemical
                                                                          experiments.”
                                                                              Nevertheless, δomonosov became Russia’s irst world-renowned scientist and did
                                                                          the same for Russian history and culture as Leonardo da Vinci and Galilei had done for
                                                                          Italy, Leibnitz and Goethe for Germany, Descartes and Voltaire for France.
                                                                              Lomonosov nourished unlimited faith in the power of science. This belief implied the
                                                                          idea of progress in general and the conviction of its usefulness for Russia’s develop-
                                                                          ment. He was convinced that the scientiic knowledge of science could serve as a pow-
                                                                          erful means to transform society. Thanks to δomonosov’s scientiic activity, statesmen
                                                                          began to understand the importance of developing the natural sciences for the growth
                                                                          of Russia, its industry and culture.
                                                                              The deinition of science formulated by δomonosov is signiicantμ “Science is ...
A.P. Lobodanov - The versatile figure of Michail Vasil’evič Lomonosov




                                                                          clear cognition of the truth.” It is science that transforms an individual into a person.
                                                                          This perception of the role of science in shaping one’s personality was also envis-
                                                                          aged by Peter the Great, to whom the following words are ascribed: “A man outside
                                                                          the sphere of learning cannot be said to be a man, since nobody knows who he is”.
                                                                          δomonosov dedicated himself entirely to the service of scienceμ “I have the irm and
                                                                          unwavering intent not to spare my temporary well-being, but to invest it in the welfare
                                                                          of the sciences in Russia,” he wrote.
                                                                              Today, δomonosov’s research in the ield of the natural sciences is part of the his-
                                                                          tory of natural sciences. On the other hand, Lomonosov is still alive in the Russian
                                                                          language, which he transformed into an instrument of scientiic and artistic expression
                                                                          in the Russian literature he created. In the successive centuries, it gave us Puškin
                                                                          and Gogol ‘, Dostoevsky and Čekhovν in art and in culture, they all followed his moral
                                                                          and civil principles which Lomonosov referred to as being essential. The ever-increas-
                                                                          ing distance that separates us from Lomonosov’s era, makes us feel the unity of his
                                                                          method of interdisciplinarity even more deeply. Every new generation of Russians con-
                                                                          ceives the igure of δomonosov in their own way, together with his contribution to Rus-
                                                                          sian science and literature, Russian language and art. It can rightly be said, without
                                                                          exaggerating, that for people today, his igure seems to be moving closer and closer,
                                                                          his presence and contemporaneity is felt, and the numerous re-editions of his works
                                                                          make his creative production true best-sellers.


                                                                              Notes

                                                                          1
                                                                           All translation of the pieces from Lomonosov’s works are by the Author in Polnoje sobranie soci-
                                                                          nenij M.V. Lomonosova [Complete works by M.V. Lomonosov], in vol. XI, Moscow, 1950- 1983].




                                                                    190
      References

[1]     Vavilov, S.I. (2011). Zakon Lomonosova [La legge di Lomonosov] // Per 300mo
        anniversario della nascita di M.V. Lomonosov. Moskva, p. 165.
[2]     Rozanov, V.V. (2011). Lomonosov. Ego ličnost’ i sud’ba [Lomonosov. La sua per-
        sonalità e il suo destino] // Per 300mo anniversario della nascita di M.V. Lomono-
        sov. Moskva, p. 135.
[3]     Cazzola, P. (1982). Michail Lomonosov, membro corrispondente dell’Accademia
        delle Scienze di Bologna // Atti della Accademia delle Scienze dell’Istituto di Bo-
        logna. Classe di Scienze Morali. Anno 76° Memorie. Vol. LXXXII. Bologna, p. 12.
[4]     L’Apothéose de Pierre le Grand: Trois écrits historiques inconnues, présumés
        de M.V. Lomonosov, destines à Voltaire. Editions de l’Académie Tchécoslovaque
        des sciences: Prague, 1964.
[5]     Nekrasova, E.A (1988). Lomonosov-chudojnik [Lomonosov-artist]. Moskva.


      Biographical Notes

   Aleksandre Lobodanov was born in Moscow on September 7, 1950. He gradu-
ated in 1973 in Romance linguistics at the Faculty of Humanities at Moscow State
University (Lomonosov). He is professor of history of the Italian language (1997), chair
of semiotics and general theory of art at the same university (2003), founder and cur-
rently dean of the Faculty of Arts (2001). He is author of 16 monographs on problems
relating to Romance, Slavic-romance linguistics, history and theory of art, art semiot-
ics. He has published more than 100 articles in various languages in Italy, Germany,
Belgium, the USA, China, Lebanon. He is a member of the Association for the History
of the Italian Language (1998, Florence) and has given lectures on issues relating to
grammar, art history and art semiotics in various universities in Rome, Florence, Bo-




                                                                                                    CONSERVATION SCIENCE IN CULTURAL HERITAGE
logna, Pisa, Berlin, New York, Prague, Belgrade, Beijing, Beirut and other countries.



    Summary
    The igure and work of εichail Vasil’evic δomonosov are signiicantly and emblem-
atically synonymous with interdisciplinarity and internationalization in one personal-
ity. It is evident from what has been described and noted in the various bibliographic
sources that have been consulted, highlighting Lomonosov’s extreme versatility and,
at the same time, his intense activity and interest in the various humanities and experi-
mental sciences.

   Riassunto
   δa igura e l’opera di εichail Vasil’evic δomonosov, sono signiicativamente ed em-
blematicamente sinonimo di interdisciplinarità e internazionalizzazione in una stessa
personalità. È quanto viene descritto e rilevato dalle diverse fonti bibliograiche con-
sultate, evidenziando l’estrema versatilità e, ad un tempo, la profondità di attività e
interessi di Lomonosov nelle varie Scienze umanistiche e sperimentali.




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