Благовещенский собор
I. The Cathedral of the Annunciation was built soon after the Assumption Cathedral. Ivan III decided that Russian masters from Pskov should work on his second cathedral rather than foreign architects from abroad. The reason was simple enough: the Annunciation Cathedral was to serve as the private chapel of the tsars, where no alien influences were to be tolerated. Moreover, the Pskov builders, having assisted Fioravante, had acquired sufficient skill to tackle a smaller church.
Only the tsars and their families would kneel before its great icon screen; only they would be married or their children be baptised there.
2. Originally it was a small brick church with three domes and had an open gallery on three sides of it with staircases going down to Cathedral Square, incorporating architectural features of earlier Russian churches. The Pskov builders adopted from their native churches belts of patterned bricks to encircle the drums. They also introduced the innovation in the form of pointed, spade-shape arches to mark the transition from the walls to the drums. These arches became a standard feature of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Moscow churches. To make entry to the royal living quarters easier, the builders placed the church on a high foundation, which rose to the level of the second storey of the royal palace.
Early in the sixteenth century the galleries were roofed. On the orders of Ivan the Terrible four small single-domed churches were built on to it plus two false domes on the western side. The result was a picturesque nine-domed edifice. The domes were covered with sheets of copper and lavishly gilded, so chroniclers had good reason to call the church "golden-headed". The transgressions of Ivan the Terrible necessitated other additions. The Russian Orthodox Church forbids its faithful to marry more than three times. When Ivan took a fourth wife, he was banned from entering the church. He found a way out by adding a second porch with a carved staircase. That enabled him to follow the liturgy from a new position rather than from the usual place for the tsars at the choirs.
4.Inside the Cathedral is rather small, as it was intended for a limited circle of worshippers. A spiral staircase, built in the thickness of the northern wall, runs to the balcony facing the sanctuary. The copper doors of the three portals of the church are also objects of great artistic worth. The murals and the icon screen make this cathedral really unique, like no other cathedral of the Kremlin. On the walls of the outside gallery one can see the portraits of Russian princes with Ivan III and Basil III being the first to greet the visitors. On the pilasters of the gallery there are figures of Greek writers and philosophers. They were meant to remind that Russia had succeeded not only Byzantine political importance and glory, but its wisdom and culture as well. Yet the location of these figures in the entry to the church rather than in the church itself is symbolic. Church fathers rate the wisdom of pagan philosophers lower than Christian teaching.
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5.Most of the original murals were replaced by later frescoes because of fires and numerous alterations, but the themes were usually repeated. Among the restored frescoes the Miracle of the Prophet Jonah on the wall of the northern gallery is the one to illustrate the idea that murals of the church walls served as the Bible for the illiterate. The whole story in the dynamics of its events is depicted on a small space of the wall. The most remarkable aspect of the Annunciation Cathedral and its greatest treasure is the gilded icon screen and its early fifteenth-century icons. The chronicle of 1405 mentioned that Andrei Rublyov, Theophanes the Greek and Prokhor from Gorodets executed the frescoes and the icons for the original Annunciation Cathedral started by Basil I in 1397 and finished in 1425. The frescoes perished during the reconstruction of the church by Ivan III, but the icons were incorporated into the new icon screen.
3. The distribution and symbolism of frescoes in the Annunciation Cathedral differs from Uspensky both because of limited space and its function as the tsar's private chapel. The murals are light, with refined shades of pale blue and gold and elongated figures of saints appearing to float in the air. The frescoes on the southern wall intended to make the tsar and his family ponder what would happen to them in the next life, stress the concept of fate and illustrate its possibilities. Each member of the royal house could wonder whether he or she would be among the chosen few entering the Garden of Eden with St Peter or would be cast before the naked Lucifer, riding atop a double-headed dog. The scenes from the Apocalypse are hardly more reassuring. A representation of Death, mounted on horseback, rides in search of victims, while angels hide from the sight of men. The paintings on the church pillars reveal another aspect of the message: princes of Russia and Byzantium stand in pairs, expressing both the conventional concept of lending support to the structure of the church and Moscow's inheritance of divine right from Byzantium through Kiev and its saints.
Text 9
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