Online Encyclopedia
Saint Isaac's Cathedral
St. Isaac's Cathedral in St. Petersburg, Russia is the largest cathedral in that city and was the largest church in Russia when it was built. It was dedicated to St Isaac of Dalmatia , who was the patron saint of the Romanovs.
The church was ordered by Tsar Alexander I, to replace an unsatisfactory structure. It was constructed over the course of forty years, from 1818 to 1858, under the direction of the French-born architect Auguste de Montferrand (1786 - 1858), who had studied in the atelier of Napoleon's designer, Charles Percier. The severe neoclassical exterior expresses a traditional Russian-Byzantine formula: a Greek-cross groundplan with a large central dome and four subsidiary domes. It is similar to Andrea Palladio's Villa La Rotonda, with a full dome on a high drum substituted for the Villa's low central saucer dome. The exterior, which barely hints at the riotously rich interior, is faced with gray and pink stone, and features a total of 112 red granite columns with Corinthian capitals, each hewn and erected as a single block: 48 at ground level, 24 on the rotunda of the uppermost dome, 8 on each of four side domes, and 2 framing each of four windows. The rotunda is encircled by a walkway accessible to tourists. 24 statues gaze down from the roof, and another 24 from the top of the rotunda.
The cathedral's doors are covered in reliefs, patterned after the celebrated doors of the Battistero di San Giovanni (Florence) in Florence, designed by Lorenzo Ghiberti. Suspended underneath the peak of the dome is a sculpted dove representing the Holy Spirit. Internal features such as columns, pilasters, floor, and statue of Montferrand are composed of multicolored granites and marbles gathered from all parts of Russia. The iconostasis is framed by eight columns of semiprecious stone: six of malachite and two smaller ones of lazurite. The four pediments are also richly sculpted.
Many technological innovations were used in the construction of the building. The massive portico columns were raised with the use of enormous wooden frameworks before the walls were erected. The dome was gilded by a technique similar to spraypaint ing; the solution used included toxic mercury, the vapors of which caused the deaths of an unknown number of workers. Over a dozen gilded statues of angels, each six metres high, face each other across the interior of the rotunda. They were constructed using galvanoplastic technology, making them only millimeters thick and very lightweight. St. Isaac's Cathedral represents the first use of this technique in architecture.
The interior was originally decorated with scores of paintings by the great Russian masters of the day. When these paintings began to deteriorate due to the cold, damp conditions inside the cathedral, Montferrand ordered them to be painstakingly reproduced as mosaics, a technique virtually unknown in Russia since the Middle Ages. This work was never completed.
Under the Soviet Russian government, the cathedral was abandoned, then turned into a museum of atheism. The dove sculpture was removed, and replaced by a Foucault pendulum. During World War II, the dome was painted over in gray to avoid attracting attention from enemy aircraft. Worship activity has since resumed in the cathedral, but only in a side chapel on the left-hand side.