Major building began in the Moscow Kremlin only after the wooden fortifications were replaced by stone walls in the 1360's. The present towers were added during the late fifteenth century by Italian architects, although the preserved tower roofs date only from the seventeenth century.

The centerpiece of the collection of medieval buildings within the Kremlin walls is the great Uspensky (Dormition) Cathedral built by the Italian architect Aristotele Fioravanti for Ivan III the Great (1462-1505) between 1475 and 1479 as the coronation church of the Muscovite rulers and the primatial cathedral of the Russian church. Applying the mathematical and engineering skills and advanced building techniques he had learned in Italy to the early architectural heritage of northeast Russia, Fioravanti created a "neo-Vladimirian" architectural style that dominated the planning of major churches in the Muscovite realm up to the eighteenth century. Although following a traditional five-dome, six-pier, Byzantine-inspired plan, the architect dispensed with the interior galleries typical of large Russian churches and created a great high open internal area of matching vaulted and domed compartments. The interior was covered with frescoes by the famous painter Dionysios the Greek and his school, although most of them have now been replaced by seventeenth-century work.

Two smaller Kremlin churches were rebuilt by Pskovian architects in the 1480's, the single-domed Rizpolozhenie Church (Church of the Deposition of the Robe, 1486) and the charming three-domed Blagoveshchensky Cathedral (Cathedral of the Annunciation, 1482-1490), the private chapel of the tsar and his family. The latter church was decorated by three of the greatest medieval Russian painters, Theophanes the Greek, Andrei Rublev, and Prokhor of Gorodets, and although their frescoes have perished (to be replaced, however, by fine sixteenth-century murals), a number of their icons are preserved in the nineteenth-century iconostasis of the church. In the 1560's, Ivan the Terrible added galleries around the church on three sides and six additional gilded domes, giving the building its present picturesque appearance.

The last of the major medieval churches of the Moscow Kremlin is the Arkhangelsky Cathedral built by the Italian Alevisio Novyi ("the Younger") in 1508. It is a six-piered church with five domes; the facade owes much to Italian Renaissance style. Decorated with frescoes of the rulers of Russia by Dionysios the Greek (almost all lost under repainting), this church served as the burial place of the rulers of Russia up to the time of Peter the Great.

There are other medieval structures preserved in the Kremlin besides churches. The Granovitaya Palace (the Palace of the Facets), an impressive, if small, building with its main facade in diamond-cut stones (whence the name), boasts a massive reception hall supported by a thick central pillar and groin vaults. The building was constructed by Marco Ruffo and Pietro Solario (1487-1491). Dominating the whole Kremlin is the Bell Tower of Ivan the Great, a striking bell cote complex including a 266-foot tower, built piecemeal between 1505 and 1600 to serve both as a belfry and a watchtower. Several buildings of the Kremlin now serve as museums of medieval Russian art.


-- George P. Majeska


FURTHER READINGS


The best available history of the architecture of the Moscow Kremlin is N. Ya. Tikhomirov, Moskovskii Kreml: Istoriya arkhitektury (1966). On the artistic treasures of the Kremlin see M. V. Alpatov, ed., Khudozhestvennye pamyatniki Moskovskogo Kremlya (1956). In English, see Arthur Voyce, The Moscow Kremlin: Its History, Architecture, and Art Treasures (1954). A good study of the Uspensky Cathedral is M. V. Alpatov, ed., Uspenskii Sobor Moskovskogo Kremlya (1971), which includes an English summary. N. N. Voronin, ed., Palaces and Churches of the Kremlin, with photographs by Karel Neubert (1965), seems to be the book of plates most useful to students of the Middle Ages.