Город Владимир Путешествие по древним городам Владимирской земли Старый Владимир Old Russian Towns Памятники архитектуры Музеи Музеи, экспозиции

Город Суздаль История Суздаля Герб суздаля Архитектура Суздаля Музеи Суздаля

Досуг и развлечения Где поесть во Владимире Где поспать во Владимире Что можно посмотреть во Владимире Где поесть в Суздале Где поспать в Суздале Что можно посмотреть в Суздале

The cathedral's interior with its four broadly planted large pillars and deeply recessed apses is just as tradi­tional as the exterior. The well-lit body of the cathedral impresses one with its size and cold dignity. It remained without wall paintings for a long time after it was built. Judging by the entries in the monastery inventory it must have had a very original appearance. The white walls were covered with icons in glittering mounts of gold, silver and enamel and rich, silk-embroidered shrouds — the gifts of wealthy pilgrims. The frescoes date back to 1689 but were "renewed" in 1865 and 1877 and have unfortunately not yet been cleaned and restored. Even in their present condition they are of con­siderable interest because the nineteenth-century renova­tors simply re-painted them without altering them. These early frescoes were the work of a team of painters under the direction of two gifted masters, Guri Nikitin and Sila Savin. One is immediately struck by the fact that the frescoes combine two different artistic styles. Some of them are composed on a large majestic scale, whereas others are full of the minute detail and complex compo­sition characteristic of icon-painting. In some cases the artists seem to have been unable to adjust their painting to the comparatively small, low interior. Beneath the fresco of the Lord of Hosts on the dome they painted huge, elongated archangels on the narrow strips of wall between the windows. The same tendency is strikingly illustrated by the excessively tall figures of other archan­gels on the altar arch and the apostles on the vaulting arches. There are also very large pictures of the twelve church festivals on the vaults. As a whole, however, the frescoes are very impressive. There is a beautiful one on the upper section of the central apse in praise of the Virgin Mary showing her sitting on a throne with Christ in her arms.

The painting on the walls and pillars consists of four comparatively narrow bands, the lower one depicting the acts of the apostles and the remaining three showing scenes of Christ's life taken from the Gospels and por­trayed with an extraordinary wealth of detail. Each scene is crowded with figures and almost merges into the next one. The action is depicted against interesting back­grounds varying from ornate palaces to strange, fantas­tic buildings, all demonstrating the artist's keen powers of observation. For the benefit of the congregation who might not be able to identify this or that scene the paint­ers added lengthy descriptions. The paintings look like a gaily coloured, patterned tapestry curling over the sides of the windows. The artists' skill is apparent in the varied lines and colours of the robes on the large figures in the sanctuary, for example, the archdeacons round the altar and the Fathers of the Church in the central apse.

The original frescoes evidently possessed a richness of colour and form which has now been exaggerated and distorted by the nineteenth-century painters. It is inter­esting that the lower tiers of painting on the surfaces of the pillars facing the altar show the founders of the Romanov dynasty, the tsars Mikhail and Alexei, as saints with haloes. They appear together with the bibli­cal kings David and Solomon, Constantine the Great who has been named the "Thirteenth Apostle" in the Eastern Church and his mother St. Helena, and the Rus­sian canonised princes Vladimir, Boris and Gleb. We also find Grand Prince Vsevolod III here, the so-called Vladimir autocrat. This feature can be traced back to the fresco painting in the great Moscow cathedrals, for example, the 1508 paintings in the Cathedral of the An­nunciation. The seventeenth century was accompanied by violent uprisings in town and countryside and the Church tried to strengthen the authority of the tsars by representing them as sacred figures.

In contrast to the cold dignity of the interior of the cathedral one is struck by the cosy atmosphere inside the Yevfimiev chapel. It is covered by a cylindrical vault in the centre of which is the dome drum with four narrow windows. The frescoes appear to have been painted at the same time as those of the cathedral in 1689 and were also renovated in the nineteenth century. There are figures of the apostles on the apse and archangels on the arch who are particularly conspicuous here because of their size. The frescoes on the other walls are devoted mainly to the life of Yevfimi. One extremely interesting scene on the north wall shows Yevfimi supervising the building of the monastery with a plan in his hands. Architects did not actually start building from plans until the end of the seventeenth century, the period of Russian Baroque. Evidence of this period can also be seen in the buildings portrayed in the frescoes, which are full of ornamental motifs found in Moscow architec­ture of that time. It should be remembered, however, that very little trace of these motifs is found in seven­teenth- and eighteenth-century Suzdalian architecture. The painters clearly knew about them from Russian buildings and West European prints, which suggests that they were not local artists.

In 1642 Prince Dmitri Pozharsky, who led the army which finally routed the Polish and Lithuanian invaders, was buried on the east side of the cathedral opposite the altar.

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