When the Kalmyks returned to the old settlement area on the Altai, he was captured by the Cossacks in 1770 and brought as a serf to St. Petersburg at the Tsar's court of Catherine the Great.

He used the nine years from 1791, which he spent mostly in Rome, to study classical antiquity and the great painters and sculptors of the Italian Renaissance, particularly Lorenzo Ghiberti, Michelangelo and Raphael.

[5] As such, he was instrumental in the decoration of the Protestant Church of Karlsruhe [de]: he created a cycle of images from the life of Jesus, which was completed after his death by Franz Joseph Zoll.

[12] Influenced by the Zeitgeists and thanks to his long stay in Rome, he developed a preference for motifs from Greek and Roman antiquity as well as for religious themes from the Renaissance.

Among other things, he created an eleven-part series of engravings from Lorenzo Ghiberti's bronze door to paradise at the Baptistery of Saint John in Florence.

[5] An illustrated book by Ivanoff with 12 copper engravings of the Florentine Gates of Paradise, published by the sculptor Heinrich Keller in Rome in 1798, was discussed in an episode of Lieb & Teuer [de] with Janin Ullmann.