Anna and Michael – instructors at the Repin Royal Academy of fine art St Petersburg – talk shop The old masters never copied nature but rather captured life in their depiction of the real. Realism for them was not justnarrative or objects but instead a toolbox of devices which modernism took and forgot to return.The old masters never copied nature but rather captured life in their depiction of the real. Realism for them was not justnarrative or objects but instead a toolbox of devices which modernism took and forgot to return.