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In the same period the cathedral of the Icon of Our Lady of Kazan' on Red Square was built to commemorate the national resistance of 1612.[329] Processions for the feasts of this and other wonder-working icons were staged several times a year throughout the century In 1625 Muscovites celebrated the acquisition of a fragment of Christ's garment. The feast of the Deposition of the Robe of Our Lord (10 July) was one of several added to the liturgical calendar that formed the basis of cultural life at court.[330] In 1642-3 teams of artists from all over Russia repainted the murals in the Kremlin Dormition cathedral, following the outlines of older images. Frescos depicting the princes and tsars of Rus' in the Archangel cathedral were similarly renovated, beginning in 1652.[331] But we have no authentic likeness of Tsar Michael, although there are records of his image (obraz, suggesting a Byzantine-style effigy) being made in the Kremlin workshops for presentation abroad.[332]

The Romanov succession was backward-looking but it also drove innovation. National recovery and independence required armies, alliances, trade and foreign expertise. The primary need was for military specialists, but others came too. In the 1620s the Scottish engineer Christopher Galloway added ornate upper portions with Gothic and Renaissance features to the Kremlin's Saviour tower and installed a clock. The Swede Johann Kristler designed a never-completed bridge over the Moskva River.[333] The first Western painter to arrive, in 1643, was Hans Deters (Deterson) from the Netherlands. Among the elite a taste grew for foreign 'novelties' and cunning technical devices (khitrosti). At the same time, Patriarch Filaret banned books published in Lithuania to combat the 'Latin' influences that had proliferated during the Time of Troubles. Tension between opening access to new ideas and protecting Orthodoxy from heresy was a defining characteristic of the seventeenth century.

Architecture and sculpture

The first masonry churches to be built after the Troubles continued sixteenth- century trends, displaying tiers of kokoshnik gables beneath the elongated drums of their cupolas or capped with tent (shater) roofs. (In the 1650s Patriarch Nikon banned 'tent' churches as uncanonical.) A sort of compendium of seventeenth-century ecclesiastical architecture is provided by the five-domed church of the Holy Trinity in Nikitniki (1631-53), built for a wealthy merchant not far from Red Square (see Plate 24).[334] The architect's imaginative flair was expended on picturesque annexes (a bell-tower and porch surmounted by tents) and on the exterior decoration. Kokoshnik gables and ornamental brickworkjostle with modified elements of the Western-order system, such as recessed half-columns and classically profiled window surrounds, pediments and cornices. The interior, constructed without internal piers, was covered in frescos. Similar churches were built all over Russia in towns, villages and monasteries, visible evidence of economic recovery In the commercial city of Iaroslavl' on the Volga merchants built dozens of churches, richly decorated outside with a veritable 'encrustation' of carved brickwork and polychrome ceramics, inside with brilliantly coloured frescos.[335] Impressive architectural projects were carried out in Rostov Velikii and in the new monasteries founded by Patriarch Nikon.

Soviet scholars associated such architecture with 'secularisation' (obmir- shchenie). By reducing domes to mere decorative appendages, they argued, and articulating facades with carved window frames, builders made their churches look like palaces and hence undermined their sacredness. But clearly neither builders nor congregations thought in such terms. Their distinctive silhouettes and lavish decorativeness made these churches highly visible landmarks in praise of God.

The culmination of the 'ornamental' style came with the 'Moscow Baroque' (a late nineteenth-century term) that flourished in and around the capital from the late 1670s and in the provinces into the 1700s.[336] Builders demonstrated a refined sense of symmetry and regularity in their ordering of both structural and decorative elements, replacing Russian ornament almost entirely with motifs derived from the classical orders: half-columns with pediments and bases, window surrounds and portals with broken pediments, volutes, fluted and twisted columns and shell gables. A particularly impressive concentration of such buildings was commissioned from unknown Russian craftsmen in the 1680s by Tsarevna Sophia for the Moscow Novodevichii convent. Civic buildings were constructed on similar principles, for example Prince Vasilii Golitsyn's Moscow mansion (1680s) and the Pharmacy on Red Square (1690s).

Structural innovation appeared in the so-called 'octagon on cube' churches in Moscow Baroque style. One of the finest examples, the church of the Intercession at Fili, built in 1690-3 by unknown architects for Peter I's uncle Lev Naryshkin, has a tower of receding octagons flanked by four annexes, each capped with a cupola and decorated with intricately carved limestone details (see Plate 25). Inside an ornate gilded iconostasis holds round and octagonal, as well as 'standard' rectangular icons, all painted in a distinctly 'Italianate' style far removed from traditional Russo-Byzantine painting.[337] This and other tower churches such as the Trinity at Troitse-Lykovo and the Saviour at Ubory (by Iakov Bukhvostov, the leading exponent of the style) may owe something to prototypes in Russian wooden architecture, as well as to 'Ruthenian' influence. Craftsmen from Belorussia and Ukraine introduced Polish Baroque and Renaissance architectural elements through the medium of wood-carving and decorative ceramics. The theory of the cultural interaction of the 'fraternal' nations fitted comfortably into the Soviet ideological framework, but Russia's 'elder brother' status limited the extent to which such borrowing could be acknowledged, as did its mainly religious character.[338] The topic requires fuller investigation.

Western architectural ideas emanated from the Armoury (see below) and Foreign Office workshops, where craftsmen had access to prints, maps and illustrated books.[339] Tsar Alexis owned a book of 'the stone buildings of all German states' and works by Vignola, Palladio and other theoreticians of the Renaissance and Baroque eras. Russian builders (zodchie)[340] were unacquainted with the theoretical underpinnings of the five orders of architecture and none, as far as we know, had first-hand experience of Western buildings, although some had been to Ukraine. But a few potential patrons picked up ideas abroad, not least Alexis himself, whose encounters with city architecture and magnates' estates while on military campaigns in Lithuania and the Baltic in the 1650s inspired him, according to his English doctor Samuel Collins, to remodel his residences.[341] Some Russians may even have ventured into Moscow's Foreign Quarter (nemetskaia sloboda) and gazed at its Protestant churches, shops and taverns, although restrictions on access limited the Quarter's impact.[342]

The hybrid nature of seventeenth-century Russian architecture is demonstrated by Tsar Alexis's wooden palace at Kolomenskoe (1660s-1670s) (see Plate 26). Simon Petrov, the director of works, was not an architect, but a master carpenter. He and his men employed traditional timber construction, but also added broken pediments and twisting columns. Ceilings were painted with signs of the Zodiac and the Seasons and Ruthenian craftsmen made such 'curiosities' as automata in the shape of lions. The tsar's wooden palace was an idiosyncratic example of the carpenters' skills that dominated both urban and rural landscapes in seventeenth-century Russia. Because so few timber buildings survive intact from the period and because there were no Russian Canalettos to record them, we can only reconstruct the urban scene from stylised images in miniatures and icons and foreigners' sketches.[343]