and opposed to realistic description, came to the fore with the fifteenth century. This style came from the southern Slavs and was introduced by such writers as Cyprian in his life of St. Peter the Metropolitan, and Epiphanius the Wise, who dealt with St. Sergius of Radonezh and St. Stephen of Perm. The southern Slavs, it should be added, exercised a strong influence on appanage literature and thought, as for example in the formulation of the doctrine of Moscow as the Third Rome.
In contrast to literature, architecture has frequently been considered one of the glories of the appanage period in spite of the fact that the age witnessed relatively little building in stone. Russian wooden architecture, to say the least, represents a remarkable achievement. Although it dates, without doubt, from the Kievan and the pre-Kievan eras, no buildings survive from those early times. It is only with the appanage and the Muscovite periods that we can trace the consecutive development of this architecture and study its monuments.
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Scythian embossed goldwork of the sixth century b.c.
Ancient monuments on the graves of the Polovtsy.
St. George and the Dragon. Novgorod School. Early 15th century.
The Old Testament Trinity. A. Rublev, early fifteenth century.
Icon from the Deesis Festival tier: Entrance into Jerusalem. Novgorod School, about 1475.
St. Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, Moscow School. 14th century.
Our Lady of Vladimir. Moscow School. End of 15th century.
Cathedral and cemetery at Ipatiev Monastery in Kostroma.
Fourteenth-century wooden church displayed at Ipatiev Monastery in Kostroma.
Preobrazhenskii Cathedral on Volga river at Uglich.
twenty or twenty-five feet long, constituted the basis of ancient Russian wooden architecture. The walls were usually eight or nine feet high. A steep, two-slope roof offered protection and prevented an accumulation of snow, while moss and later hemp helped to plug cracks and holes. At first the floors were earthen, later wooden floors were constructed. A klet represented the living quarters of a family. Another, usually smaller, klet housed livestock and supplies. Generally the two were linked by a third small structure, a passageway, which also contained the door to the outside. A peasant household thus consisted of three separate, although connected, units. As the owner became more prosperous, or as his sons started families of their own, additional kleti were built and linked to the old ones, the ensemble growing, somewhat haphazardly, as a conglomeration of distinct, yet joined, structures.
After the Russians accepted Christianity, they adapted their wooden architecture to the Byzantine canons of church building. The three required parts of a church were erected as follows: the sanctuary, always on the eastern side, consisted of a small klet; the main section of the church, where the congregation stood, was built as a large double klet, one on top of the other; finally, another small klet on the western side constituted the
Various developments in church architecture followed. Frequently a special basement klet was constructed under each of the three kleti constituting the church proper, which was thus raised to a second-floor level while its main part acquired a three-story elevation. The basement could be used for storage; a high outside staircase and porch were built to secure entrance to the church. The sanctuary sometimes assumed the form not of a quadrangle, but of a polygon, for instance, an octagon. The roofs of the churches became steeper and steeper, until many of them resembled wedges. In contrast to the Byzantine tradition of building churches with one or five cupolas, the Russians, whether they worked in stone or in wood, early demonstrated a liking for more cupolas. It might be noted that St. Sophia in Kiev had thirteen cupolas, and another Kievan church, that of the Tithe, had twenty-five. Numerous wooden churches also possessed many cupolas, including a remarkable one with seventeen and another with twenty-one.
The Russians not only translated Byzantine stone church architecture into another medium, wood, but they also developed it further in a creative and varied manner. Especially original and striking were the so-called
tent, or pyramidal, churches, of which some from the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries have escaped destruction. In the tent churches the main part of the church was a high octagon - although occasionally it had six or twelve sides - which provided the foundation for a very high pyramidal, sometimes conical, roof, capped by a small cupola and a cross. The elevation of these roofs ranged from 125 to well over 200 feet. The roofs of the altar and the pritvor were, by contrast, usually low. To quote Grabar, perhaps the most distinguished historian of Russian architecture and art, concerning tent churches:
Marvelously strict, almost severe, in their majestic simplicity are these giants, grown into the earth, as if one with it… The idea of the eternity and immensity of the church of Christ is expressed here with unbelievable power and utmost simplicity. The simplicity of outline has attained in them the highest artistic beauty, and every line speaks for itself, because it is not forced, not contrived, but absolutely necessary and logically inevitable.
Weidle wrote of undeveloped Gothic in Russia, an approach not unrelated to the general concept of undeveloped Russian feudalism.
By contrast, architecture in stone, as already indicated, experienced a decline in the appanage period, although stone churches continued to be built in Novgorod and in lesser numbers in some other centers. To illustrate regression, historians have often cited the inability of Russian architects in the 1470's to erect a new Cathedral of the Assumption, the patron church of Moscow, using the Cathedral of the Assumption in Vladimir as their model. Yet this incident also marked the turning point, for Ivan III invited foreign specialists to Moscow and initiated stone building on a large scale. The most important result of the revival of stone architecture was the construction of the heart of the Kremlin in Moscow, a fitting symbol of the new authority, power, and wealth of the Muscovite rulers.
Beginning in 1474, Ivan III sent a special agent to Venice and repeatedly invited Italian architects and other masters to come to work for him in Moscow. The volunteers included a famous architect, mathematician, and engineer, Aristotle Fieravanti, together with such prominent builders as Marco Ruffo, Pietro Solario, and Alevisio. Fieravanti, who lived in Russia from 1475 to 1479, erected the Cathedral of the Assumption in the Kremlin on the Vladimir model, but with some differences. In 1490 architects from Pskov constructed in the same courtyard the Cathedral of the Annunciation, a square building with four inside pillars, three altar apses, five cupolas, and interesting decorations. It reflected the dominant influence of Vladimir architecture, but also borrowed elements from the tradition of Novgorod and Pskov and from wooden architecture. Next, still working on the Kremlin
