The life of the famous painter Orest Adamovich Kiprensky (1782–1836) has remained the subject of gossip and legends up to the present day - from simple inventions to outrageous slander: he was accused of the brutal murder of a model who burned alive (presumably his mistress); in an indecent relationship with a girl who later became his wife; they spoke of him as a painter who had wasted his talent in Italy. Despite numerous studies about the artist, many questions about his biography remained unanswered; ominous legends were repeatedly repeated and thereby perpetuated without checking the facts. The book by Paola Buoncristiano and Alessandro Romano publishes for the first time a significant amount of new, unpublished archival materials and documents that restore historical truth and refute false stories about Kiprensky. Researchers also managed to find traces of the artist’s only daughter, whose fate remained unknown until now. By turning to new sources and reinterpreting old ones, the authors manage to fill in the gaps in the Italian biography of Kiprensky and offer the reader a more reliable portrait of the artist. Paola Buoncristiano is a philologist, author of books and articles on Russian literature and Russian-Italian relations, and an employee of the international magazine “Russica Romana”. Alessandro Romano is a Russian scholar, translator of the works of N.V. Gogol, S.S. Uvarov, V.D. Yakovlev into Italian.