The influence of the outstanding scholar N. P. Kondakov and his research school on M. I. Rostovtzev as a scholar was multifaceted and powerful. The main lines of this influence are traced here: the young Rostovtzev’s attendance of his teacher’s lectures on art history and archaeology at the university, his participation in the circle established by Kondakov at the Museum of Antiquities, their joint research trips, especially to Italy and Spain in 1896, Rostovtzev’s visits to the jours fixes in Kondakov’s home (the so-called Liberal Academy), his personal meetings and talks with Kondakov and Kondakov’s pupils, especially with Ya. I. Smirnov and S. A. Zhebelev, and his study of Kondakov’s scholarly works. M. I. Rostovtzev took a new approach to the animal style, which his teacher had researched for many decades.