The court elite was the principal target of visual displays of legitimacy, for their loyalty to the regime was essential. Starting in Ivan III's formative reign, court ritual was heightened. A Byzantine coronation ceremony was tried out in a moment of political crisis in 1498 and a more elaborate one used in 1547 when Ivan IV took the title of "tsar"; participants processed through the Kremlin's cathedrals and listened as the ruler was admonished about his power and his obligations. Elaborate wedding rituals began to be recorded, since the formal roles assigned to men and women in the highest clans constituted proof of high rank. When the Romanov dynasty came to power in 1613, they shored up their legitimacy by copying these books and replicating traditional wedding ceremonies.
SYMBOLIC CENTERS AND BUILT ENVIRONMENT
The built environment has long served empires as a means of broadcasting power. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz drew attention to how states construct "symbolic centers," often a capital city that declared symbolically through its architecture, the functions of public buildings, and their interior decoration the nature of ruler and state. In turn such capitals established an imperial style that would then be disseminated around the realm. Capital cities—Persepolis, Rome, Baghdad, Constantinople, Istanbul—routinely claimed legitimacy by uniting architectural and monumental styles across time. Emperor Theodosius in the late 300s imported to Constantinople a fifteenth-century BCE Egyptian obelisk to lay claim to universal empire; when Khubilai Khan occupied Beijing in 1265, he created imperial architecture in a mixture of Mongol, Chinese, and Muslim styles; Ottoman architects retained Byzantium's monuments and Orthodox cathedrals in Constantinople, while they built their own palaces and mosques in a style integrating Turkish and Persian architecture and decoration. Symbolic centers acted out the imperial imaginary: Ottoman rulers, for example, constructed mosque communities with schools, hospitals, and convalescent homes to fulfill the sultan's obligations of benevolence and piety; Muscovite rulers founded and patronized monasteries as they traversed their realms (Mozhaisk, 1563; Pereslavl'-Zalesskii, 1564).
Just like other imperial counterparts, Muscovite rulers constructed a "symbolic center" in the Kremlin. Ivan III (ruled 1462-1505) and Vasilii III (ruled 1505-33) transformed this fortress high above the Moscow River from an outpost ofwooden walls and buildings to an exquisite stone ensemble, glittering with gold leaf and onion domes, and magnificent in the magnitude and variety of its edifices. Demonstrating Moscow's conquests, new cathedrals incorporated decorative elements from Novgorod and Pskov architecture and Novgorodian-style icons and frescos. Italian engineers proclaimed Moscow's cosmopolitan status by inserting Renaissance details across the Kremlin—Milanese swallow-tail merlons on the fortress wall, Venetian scallop shells in the Archangel Michael Cathedral, protruding brick facets from northern Italy on the "Faceted Chamber," a tower clock (Figure 6.4). Aristoteli Fioravanti from Bologna and Florence subtly designed the centerpiece Cathedral of the Dormition (Uspenskii sobor, 1479) according to Renaissance "golden section" proportions, even while heeding his patrons' instructions to copy the twelfth-century Dormition Cathedral in Vladimir. Such replication not only embodied historical continuity with the Grand Princes of Kyiv and Vladimir, but also provided Muscovy with an imperial architectural style. Anchoring
Figure 6.4 Reconstructed in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, Moscow's Kremlin ensemble with several grand cathedrals broadcasts the realm's identity as both powerful and Orthodox Christian. Motifs such as Milanese swallow-tail merlons evidence the hand of the ensemble's Italian architects, while decorative and structural details from Novgorod and Pskov architecture testify to Moscow's regional conquests. Photo: Jack Kollmann.
monastic ensembles, as in the Khutinskii Monastery in Novgorod (1515), the Novodevichii Convent in Moscow (1524), and the Trinity St. Sergii Monastery outside of Moscow (1559-85), or constituting a town's main church, as in Iaroslavl' (1506-16), Rostov (early sixteenth century), Pereiaslavl' Zalesskii (1557), Vologda (1568-70), Dormition-style five-domed cathedrals imprinted the landscape with Moscow's imperial presence.
As Moscow moved into non-Russian territory, its ability to use architecture to make a visual statement depended upon the local setting. In conquering Polotsk in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1562, for example, Moscow's architectural idiom was not radically different from the Orthodox churches of this old East Slavic city. Rather than construct new edifices, the conquering Ivan IV "consecrated" the city by entering on foot in cross procession and by hearing the liturgy in the town's ancient Sofiia Cathedral (1044-66). In brief occupations of the Livonian town of Narva, Moscow constructed a mighty fortress (late fifteenth century) and an Orthodox church (1558), marking an alien imperial presence in this town of German architecture.
Moving towards Kazan' in the mid-sixteenth century, church and military architecture provided a sharp contrast to local building styles. In 1551 in Sviazhsk, a staging area outside of Kazan, Moscow built a fortified center, a monastery, and a magnificent Dormition Cathedral. Once having conquered Kazan' in 1552, Moscow transformed the Kazan citadel. The Tatar population was moved out and mosques, minarets, and fortifications were destroyed. The fortress was rebuilt in the style of the Moscow Kremlin, with tent-shaped towers and Italianate merlons. A wooden Cathedral of the Annunciation was consecrated, followed soon thereafter (1561-2) by a limestone five-domed Dormition Cathedral, adorned with decorative brick detail by Pskov architects. By century's end the Kazan Kremlin's Savior-Transfiguration Monastery had two stone churches, monasteries had been established on the outskirts of Kazan, and wood and stone churches erected in urban neighborhoods for Russian cavalrymen, musketeers, artisans, and coachmen. All these structures evoked Muscovite styles from the five-domed cathedral to more modest tent-shaped churches.
In the seventeenth century Moscow's style of religious architecture added decorative features from Russian tradition in sufficient effusion to merit the title "Moscow baroque." Scallop shells borrowed from the Kremlin's St. Michael Cathedral, painted motifs echoing the brick facets from the Faceted Chamber, nested tiers of gables evoking Russian married women's headdresses—all adorned Orthodox churches that remained structurally unchanged. At mid-century reformist Patriarch Nikon banned the tent shape (derived from village wooden architecture) from churches as too undignified for a consecrated building, but it was promptly used in bell towers instead. This created a characteristic "ship"-shaped horizontal outline: a tall, vertical bell tower/entrance at the west connecting to a long nave and cuboid domed apse at the east end (Figure6.5). By the late seventeenth century, Moscow's home-grown "baroque" was joined by a style called the "Naryshkin baroque" after the family of Peter I's mother who patronized it. Stemming from Ukrainian baroque, this style featured centrally planned churches
Figure 6.5 Moscow's St. Nicholas Church in Khamovniki (the Weavers' District) (1679-82) demonstrates the "ship" profile of church ensembles that became common as a result of Patriarch Nikon's prohibition of the "tent" shape on churches. A tall tent-roofed bell tower at the west entrance links to a cubical four-domed church in a long horizontal line. Its exterior decoration displays the Moscow baroque. Photo: Jack Kollmann.
with a predominantly vertical, rather than horizontal, silhouette. In some cases their facades were more orderly than the "Moscow baroque," but still very detailed, with rounded corners, oval windows, elaborate window surrounds. In other examples, such as the Fili Church outside of Moscow (1690-3), Naryshkin baroque was exuberantly decorative, with balustrades ornamented with statuary (unheard of in Orthodox churches), multiple staircases, and profuse pilasters outlining windows and structural lines, bespeaking Catholic influence through Ukraine.