Last Friday, ITAR-TASS hosted a presentation of a new book "Church of the Ascension in Kolomenskoye: architecture, archeology, history", written by archaeologist Leonid Belyaev and architectural historian Andrei Batalov. Despite the hard frost of the last January day, this event gathered a full hall of journalists, researchers, scientists, guides and people who are simply not indifferent to the history of Moscow. The book itself was presented for familiarization right in the hall, and anyone could come up and flip through its pages.
Sergey Khudyakov, Director of the Moscow State Museum-Reserve "Kolomenskoye"
by the decision of the scientific and methodological council of which the book was published, he reminded the audience that in 1994 the temple was included in the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The publication of the book, written by famous scientists Leonid Belyaev and Andrei Batalov, according to Khudyakov, was timed to coincide with the 20th anniversary of this date and the 90th anniversary of the museum. For many years, various scientists have explored the territory of the Kolomenskoye Museum-Reserve, where there are 36 architectural monuments and 18 more cultural heritage sites. In this series, the Church of the Ascension has always occupied a leading place, while causing a lot of questions from researchers.
The new book is the first scientific monograph fully devoted to the Church of the Ascension in Kolomenskoye. It sums up two hundred years of research on the mysterious masterpiece, lifts the veil of secrecy over the name of the architect who built such an unusual building for Moscow, destroys myths associated with the evolutionary development of Russian architecture, reveals the secrets of the famous "stone throne" and the ancient Kolomna cemeteries of the XIV-XVI centuries, - I am sure museum director.
Leonid Belyaev, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Head of the Department of Archeology of the City of Moscow, Institute of Archeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Editor-in-Chief of the Russian Archeology journal,
said that he began to work on the territory of the museum in the early 1970s. The monuments of Kolomenskoye have always been more accessible for study than, say, the monuments of the Moscow Kremlin. It was Kolomenskoye and, in particular, the Church of the Ascension that made it possible to compose a fairly complete archaeological picture of Moscow. For example, due to the fact that the cultural layer around the church was covered by the building remains of the 1530s, there is a certainty that layers of the XIV-XV centuries are located under them. Archaeological finds have shed light on the church itself. The study of its foundations, which represent a completely uncommon engineering structure, convinced the researchers of the uniqueness of the building. It was obvious that the architecture of the Church of the Ascension, with its tent-roof in the form of a multi-faceted pyramid, was innovative for its time.
Later, when the opportunity arose to visit the famous monuments of Europe, climb the steps of the baptistery in Florence or look under the roof of the baptistery in Pisa, the unifying features between Italian architecture with its Romano-Gothic traditions during the early Renaissance and the architecture of the church in Kolomenskoe became clearly visible. “The fact that the author could be Italian was also mentioned in earlier studies, one way or another affecting the Church of the Ascension in Kolomenskoye,” says Leonid Belyaev. Jerusalem is a completely new scientific concept."
Andrey Batalov, Doctor of Art History, Professor, Deputy Director General for Scientific Work of the Moscow Kremlin Museums, Chief Researcher of the Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Arts, Leading Researcher of the State Research Institute of Art History,
explained that in their book they tried to “bring down the rather shabby structure of the myth about Russian architecture. The main myth about the evolutionary development of architecture, about the origin of complex forms from the simplest, and all stone forms from wood, was formed back in the 1830s. The famous scientist Ivan Zabelin, who created a huge base for the study of Moscow history, wrote an article on the originality of Russian architecture and thus forever enclosed Russian architecture in the close embrace of the theory of the origin of stone tent-roofed temples from wooden ones. After the Great Patriotic War, on the patriotic wave, this theory became a rigid ideological scheme. All the inconsistencies of this theory had to be eliminated, to the extent that some wooden temples were transferred - moreover, the earliest hipped wooden temples date back only to the 17th century."
The research materials presented in the book prove that the Church of the Ascension is the first stone tent-roofed temple. All other tent-roofed temples were built after the victory over Kazan - that is, decades after the completion of the construction of the Church of the Ascension in Kolomenskoye. This church itself had no prototypes.
As for the master who built the Church of the Ascension, the authors of the book came to the conclusion that he could have been Pietro Anibale, better known in Russian historiography as Petrok Malaya, an architect from Lombardy who fell into the service of the Moscow prince. He is also considered the author of the Church of the Ascension in the Moscow Kremlin, blown up in 1812, the citadel of Kitay-Gorod and the Church of St. George. Pietro Anibale transferred the realities of Tuscany to the banks of the Moskva River, combining an independent creative concept with primordial Russian traditions, concluded Professor Batalov.
Dmitry Shvidkovsky, Doctor of Arts, Vice President of the Russian Academy of Arts,
called the presented book "outstanding, since it is not only an example of a unique interdisciplinary study that brought together the efforts of architects, archaeologists, historians and art historians, but, in addition, defines the place of Russian architecture of the 16th century in world culture."
We add: the assumption that the Church of the Ascension in Kolomenskoye was built by an Italian architect, and became the starting point for the development of the typology of Russian tent-roofed churches, was first expressed in one of the articles of the historian and restorer Sergei Sergeevich Podyapolsky. The book develops this into a version and brings it to its logical conclusion. In addition, she summarizes the results of the excavations and all the historical information about the temple. So this book, given its sufficient popularity among readers, can become the reason for the final consolidation of the Italian version of the origin of Russian tents - as opposed to the "authentic soil", in which many are still confident. No wonder there were so many people at the presentation.
The book has already gone on sale, you can buy it at the Kolomenskoye Museum-Reserve.
