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Tatiana Valerianovna Ilina, Honorary Professor of St Petersburg University, a leading figure in the St Petersburg school of art history, and a teacher to several generations of scholars, died on 26 October 2020 at the age of 86.

She graduated from Leningrad State University in 1956 and began teaching there in 1967. From 1996 to 2011, she headed the Department of Art History, later the Department of the History of Russian Art. Her scholarship made a fundamental contribution to the study of eighteenth-century Russian art.

Having begun her research with medieval Russian illuminated manuscripts, Professor Ilina later turned to the art of the eighteenth century. Her doctoral dissertation on the life and work of Ivan Vishnyakov combined archival research with technical examination and stylistic and iconographic analysis. This integrated approach marked an important development in Russian art history.

Her lectures reached well beyond students of art history: for more than half a century she also taught at the Rimsky-Korsakov St Petersburg State Conservatory. She wrote nine monographs and twelve textbooks on Russian and Western European art and supervised around thirty candidate dissertations and three doctoral dissertations.

To her students and colleagues, Tatiana Ilina was not only a distinguished scholar and teacher but also a generous and attentive mentor. Her memory lives on in the work of her students and in the scholarly tradition she helped to shape.