Baroque Architecture - Russia

Russia

In Russia, Baroque architecture passed through three stages—the early Moscow Baroque, with elegant white decorations on red-brick walls of rather traditional churches, the mature Petrine Baroque, mostly imported from the Low Countries, and the late Rastrelliesque Baroque, which was, in the words of William Brumfield, "extravagant in design and execution, yet ordered by the rhythmic insistence of massed columns and Baroque statuary."

The first baroque churches were built in the estates of the Naryshkin family of Moscow boyars. It was the family of Natalia Naryshkina, Peter the Great's mother. Most notable in this category of small suburban churches were the Intercession in Fili (1693–96), the Holy Tritity church in Troitse-Lykovo (1690-1695) and the Saviour in Ubory (1694–97). They were built in red brick with profuse detailed decoration in white stone. The belfry was not any more placed beside the church as was common in the 17th century, but on the facade itself, usually surmounting the octagonal central church and producing daring vertical compositions. As the style gradually spread around Russia, many monasteries were remodeled after the latest fashion. The most delightful of these were the Novodevichy Convent and the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow, as well as Krutitsy metochion and Solotcha Cloister near Riazan. Civic architecture also sought to conform to the baroque aesthetics, e.g., the Sukharev Tower in Moscow and there is also a neo-form of this style like the Principal Medicine Store on Red Square. The most important architects associated with the Naryshkin Baroque were Yakov Bukhvostov and Peter Potapov.

Petrine Baroque is a name applied by art historians to a style of Baroque architecture and decoration favoured by Peter the Great and employed to design buildings in the newly-founded Russian capital, Saint Petersburg, under this monarch and his immediate successors. Unlike contemporaneous Naryshkin Baroque, favoured in Moscow, the Petrine Baroque represented a drastic rupture with Byzantine traditions that had dominated Russian architecture for almost a millennium. Its chief practitioners – Domenico Trezzini, Andreas Schlüter, and Mikhail Zemtsov – drew inspiration from a rather modest Dutch, Danish, and Swedish architecture of the time. Extant examples of the style in St Petersburg are the Peter and Paul Cathedral, the Twelve Colleges, the Kunstkamera, Kikin Hall and Menshikov Palace.The Petrine Baroque structures outside St Petersburg are scarce; they include the Menshikov Tower in Moscow and the Kadriorg Palace in Tallinn.