Onion Dome - Modern View

Modern View

In 1946, the historian Boris Rybakov, while analysing miniatures of ancient Russian chronicles, pointed out that most of them, from the thirteenth century onward, display churches with onion domes rather than helmet domes. Nikolay Voronin, the foremost authority on pre-Mongol Russian architecture, seconded his opinion that onion domes existed in Russia as early as the thirteenth century, although they presumably could not be widespread. These findings demonstrated that Russian onion domes could not be imported from the Orient, where onion domes did not replace spherical domes until the fifteenth century.

Sergey Zagraevsky, a modern art historian, surveyed hundreds of Russian icons and miniatures, from the eleventh century onward. He concluded that most icons painted after the Mongol invasion of Rus display only onion domes. First onion domes displayed on some pictures of twelfth century (two miniatures from Dobrylov Evangelie). He found only one icon from the late fifteenth century displaying a dome resembling the helmet instead of an onion. His findings led him to dismiss fragments of helmet domes discovered by restorators beneath modern onion domes as post-Petrine stylisations intended to reproduce the familiar forms of Byzantine cupolas. Zagraevsky also indicated that the oldest depictions of the two Vladimir cathedrals represent them as having onion domes, prior to their replacement by classicizing helmet domes.

Zagraevsky explains the ubiquitous appearance of onion domes in the late thirteenth century by the general emphasis on verticality characteristic of Russian architecture from the late twelfth to early fifteenth centuries. At that period, porches, pilasters, vaults and drums were arranged to create a vertical thrust, to make the church seem taller than it was. It seems logical that elongated, or onion, domes were part of the same proto-Gothic trend aimed at achieving pyramidal, vertical emphasis.