Art in Novgorod
With the fall of Kiev in 1240 during the Mongol occupation, the Metropolitan Maximus moved to Vladimir in 1299, though his successor Peter moved the Church’s residence to Moscow in 1325 where it would stay permanently. These geographical shifts in the Russian Church’s history were significant for the art since it tended to follow the power, and indeed the money. So, famous icons produced in Constantinople like Our Lady of Vladimir left that city for Kiev, then Vladimir and finally Moscow which became the capital of Russia. Another consequence of Kiev and Vladimir’s decline in importance was the rise of another city- Novgorod. This also became the most important city in medieval Russia because it lay on the route connecting Moscow and St Petersburg, though the latter would not be built until the seventeenth-century.[1] Novgorod was a republican city state like Venice; it traded with German factories, and belonged to the Hanseatic League. Its archbishop was chosen by election of the people, not subject to confirmation to Byzantium. In 1222 the Mongols led by Genghis Khan seized the Crimea in the south; in 1237 the Tartars entered Northern Russia sacking and destroying Ryazan, Vladimir, and Moscow followed by Chernigov and Kiev in 1240. However, Novgorod was never captured by the Mongols; the invaders turned back about 120 miles from the city, probably due to the marshlands upon which the city is built. However, some Khans of the “Golden Hoard” demanded taxes in 1259 leading to the famed Russian hero Alexander Nevsky (1221-63) repulsing them, though he would eventually agree to pay tribute to the Mongols while fighting the German and Swedish invaders. Novgorod’s cultural and religious significance is proved by the fact that between 1228 and 1462 no less than 150 churches were built in the city. Among the most important were Snetgorsky Convent (near Pskov), the Church of the Dormition and the Church of the Nativity. Perhaps the most impressive is the Cathedral of St Sophia built by Vladimir of Novgorod between 1045 and 1050 which again was modelled on the more famous Byzantine Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, which always seems to have been in the minds of these early city-builders. Amongst the many art treasures inside the Russian St Sophia is the Our Lady of the Sign credited with saving the city from capture in 1169. Unlike Kiev Cathedral, Novgorod St Sophia is more austere in decoration. Apart from the art, there are two sets of doors of which the most impressive is the Plock or Magdeburg Gates which I am tempted to call Russia’s version of the Florentine doors, though of course these pre-date the “Doors of Paradise.” In fact the Magdeburg Gates may have been looted from the Swedish town of Sigtuna in 1187; they were probably manufactured by Magdeburg masters for Archbishop Plock in Poland. Though some art can be seen in these buildings, like the Korsun icons, most Russian and Byzantine art has been transferred to the Tretyakov Museum in Moscow including some of the icons associated with the so-called “Novgorod School” of painters- see below. Things stayed calm until 1570 when St Sophia was looted by the oprichnina, or political police of Ivan the Terrible, Ivan IV, (1530-1584) (above) who thought the city was planning to defect to Lithuania. Ivan regarded himself as the rightful heir of the Roman and Byzantine empires; hence he crowned himself as “Czar” which means Ceasar which allowed the clergy to “invent an ideology which placed the Czars of Moscow at the head of the new world State.”[2] The paranoid Ivan earned his name by destroying Novgorod, killing most of its inhabitants and ravaging the countryside thus ensuring its economic doom. The Siege of Novgorod marked the decline of the city from a cultural beacon into a dull provincial town. This decline is symbolised by Ivan dismissing the Archbishop of Novgorod and telling him to make his living with a bear and some bagpipes that the monarch bestowed upon the prelate as a form of sarcastic parting gift. With Ivan’s destruction- both physical and economic- of Novgorod, the Republic of Novgorod (1136-1478) ceased to exist. Novgorod had a revenge of sorts on the fearsome Russian Tsar many centuries later. In 1862, two sculptors were commissioned to design the massive monument “The Millenium of Russia,” a sort of Russian history in bronze, which contains such luminaries from Russian history such as Pushkin, Gogol, Vladimir the Great, Peter the Great, but not – for obvious reasons- Ivan the Terrible whose crimes against Novgorod could not be forgotten nor forgiven.
[1] Novgorod means in English “new town” as the prefix nov = new, and gorod = town. Though Byzantium hierarchs representing the Russian church signed a union with the pope at the Council of Florence in 1439, the act was rejected by a Moscow prince in 1441. Moscow began to see itself as “the third Rome.” There wouldn’t be a “fourth Rome” on earth after the Czars.
[2] Leicht, History of World Art, 191.
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