The portrait of the political elite as sight of power

The paper examines two group portraits of the Russian political elite - works of Ilya Repin and contemporary Russian artists Farid Bogdalov and Sergey Kalinin. The author examines the contexts and contents of two paintings, written on the 100th and the 200th anniversary of the Russian State Council. The artifacts were analyzed from the standpoint of the concept of power as a spectacle, as the visualization of different traditions of political symbolism (imperial, contemporary Russian and the Soviet ones).