Russian church architecture

The Russian Orthodox churches are distinguished by their verticality, bright colors and multiple domes which provide a striking contrast with the flat Russian landscape often covered in snow. The very first churches in Kievan Rus', such as the 13-domed wooden St. Sophia Cathedral in Novgorod, differed in this regard from their mainly single-cupola Byzantine predecessors. The number of domes was important symbolically. One dome symbolized the single God; three represented the Trinity and five represented Christ and his four evangelists. At first the baptistery, narthex, and choir gallery above the narthex were a common feature of Rus' churches, but gradually they disappeared. After a century of Byzantine imitations, the Russian masons began to emphasise the verticality in church design.

The late 12th century saw the development of so-called tower churches in Polotsk and Smolensk; this design later spread to other areas such as Kiev and Chernihiv. A visual transition between the main cube of the church and the elongated cylinder below the dome was provided by one or several rows of curved corbel arches, known as kokoshniki. They could be spade-shaped, semicircular, or pointed. In later Muscovite churches, the massed banks of kokoshniki evolved into a distinctive pyramidal shape. The reign of Ivan the Terrible was marked by the introduction of so-called tent roofs. The churches such as St. Basil's Cathedral were an agglomeration of chapels capped by the steeply-pitched conical roofs of fanciful designs.

The architects of Vladimir-Suzdal switched from brick to white limestone ashlar as their main building material, which provided for dramatically effective church silhouettes, but made church construction very costly. The ornamentation combined native carpentry, oriental, Italian Renaissance, and German Gothic motifs. The architects of Novgorod and Pskov constructed their churches of fieldstone and undressed blocks of limestone. As a result, the northwestern buildings have highly textured walls, as if hand-moulded of clay. A trefoil facade with pointed gables was a common arrangement in the later Novgorod Republic. The churches of Pskov were tiny and gabled; they developed an enclosed gallery which led to a porch and a simple belfry, or zvonnitsa.

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