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Lombard Sculptures from Saint Sophia of Kijv at the Russian National Museum in Moscow

Spiriti Andrea

Dipartimento di Scienze Umane e dell’Innovazione per il Territorio (Disuit), Università degli Studi dell’Insubria, DISUIT, 21100 Varese-Como, Italy

Arts 2025, 14(1), 1; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts14010001

Submission received: 22 July 2024 / Accepted: 6 December 2024 / Published: 31 December 2024

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Russia: Histories of Mobility)

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Abstract

A group of Romanesque sculptures today at the Gosudarstvennyj Istoričeskij Muzej in Moscow, coming from the restoration of the Cathedral of Saint Sophia in Kijv, can be related to the commission of Vladimir II Monomak, Grand Prince of Kijv, cultural heir of both his great-grandfather, the grand prince Vladimir I (who had founded the church between 1011 and 1037), and of his grandfather, the Eastern Roman Emperor Constantine IX: It is argued here that, alongside the Byzantine mosaicists certainly present, the sculptures are the work of a group of artists from the Lombardy lakes (also known as Comacine masters), attested in central and eastern Europe through Bavaria, Bohemia, Poland and then arriving in Sweden, active in Kijv between 1113 and 1125. It is probable that their specific origin is from Valchiavenna.

Keywords:

Kijv; Vladimir II; Comacine masters

Like all the homologous institutions that arose in the second half of the nineteenth century, the Gosudarstvennyj Istoričeskij Muzej in Moscow (projected and built from 1872 to 1881)1 is based on a chronological principle, in this case from prehistory to the contemporary time, aimed at demonstrating the homogeneity of the nation state in the opposing view of the multinational empire. This explains the presence, in the medieval area, of an environment dedicated to stone sculptures from the cathedral of Saint Sophia in Kijv, revered in its role as the matrix of Russian Christianity following the “conversion”2 of Grand Prince Vladimir I in 988; the materials were, in turn, the result of removal during the nineteenth-century restorations, aimed at partially recovering the medieval structure of the Baroque basilica. Before moving on to analyzing the pieces, however, it is essential to understand the historical context in which they were created and of which determines their profound meaning.

The traditional foundation date of the Kijvite basilica of 1037 today tends to be anticipated by historiography3 to be 1011, i.e., under the reign of Vladimir I himself4; in fact, it is difficult to think that the political–religious act was not followed by an adequate sacred space, as happens in all homologous cases; perhaps an immediate temporary site (wooden?) could be hypothesized, replaced after twenty years with a more stable one. The fact that the first grand prince to be buried there was Jaroslav in 1054 denotes, on the one hand, an end to the works (which should be thought of over a period of thirty/forty years); on the other, the political necessity of a burial in sinu Ecclesiae in the dramatic moment in which the break between the Church of Rome and that of Constantinople in 1054 occurred placed the grand principality in need of a choice which, as expected, went in the direction of the latter. It may be that the traditional 1034 marks the date, under Yaroslav, of the end of the building works in the strict sense and the beginning of the decorative ones, as the ruined fragment of a fresco with the grand prince and his family would demonstrate. The following sixty years were marked by civil war and alternating successions among the three sons of Jaroslav (Izjaslav, Sviatopolk II, and Vsevolod), until in 1113, Vladimir II Vsevolodovich took power. Already in 1042, the succession to the Byzantine imperial throne5 of Constantine IX Monomachus as the new husband of Zoe (daughter of Constantine VIII the Macedonian) was soon contested by the admiral Giorgio Maniace6 (how could we not mention the castle in Syracuse?), an ally of Vsevolod who attempted to capture Byzantium; peace was concluded in 1046 with the marriage between the grand prince and the daughter of the basiléus, Anastasia7, and Vladimir was born from the union, whose half-sister Eupraxia/Prassede/Adelaide would conclude her imperial marriage with Henry IV8 with an annulment in 1095.

Therefore, Vladimir could boast of an Eastern Roman emperor grandfather—in fact, he took the nickname of Monomachus from him—and, for a certain period, of a Holy Roman emperor brother-in-law; but, he was in a delicate position in many ways. This sixty-year-old was a successor, not to his father, but to his uncle Svyatopolk twenty years after the death of his predecessor. Squeezed between religious loyalty to Byzantium and a now unstable link to the emperor Alexius I Comnenus, Vladimir needed legitimization; exploiting his homonymy with his great-great-grandfather and his link to his father’s burial in Saint Sophia, in 1113, he promoted a great mosaic figuration9 with the famous Saint Demetrius (found today in the Gosudarstvennaja Tret’jakovskaja Galereja in Moscow)10. This represented various results: full figurative adherence to the Komnenian renaissance; a renewed relationship with the Constantinopolitan court; the choice of a “chivalrous” saint who, on the one hand, was deeply connected to the Eastern Empire for the epicenter of the cult in Thessalonica, and who, on the other hand, forged a bridge towards the “Latin” crusaders who, just as they passed through the cities during the spring of 1097, had made Demetrius their co-patron with George. I will not enter here into the intricate question of the overall dating of the Kijvite mosaics, but I reiterate that the most significant part was from Comnena and was due to the patronage of Vladimir II. I believe it plausible that the grand prince started the stone figuration of the basilica, and that everything was concluded in a decade by his death in 1125 (with a burial in Saint Sophia) or shortly after, under his son and successor Mstislav I (let us say, by about 1130), who had already demonstrated his qualities as a patron in Novgorod.

The hypothesis is that Vladimir II behaved in the sculptural field as in the devotional one; that is, he sought a politically fruitful balance between the East and the West by choosing Byzantine mosaicists and Western sculptors for his cathedral. The first datum is of a technical nature: already, the construction of the church must have represented a great logistical effort for the grand principality compared to the usual wooden building; it is difficult to think of the creation of a local school of sculpture out of nothing. On the other hand, we do not have the delayed chronological gap that qualifies the reception of many other subsequent figurative innovations: as for the mosaics, the update on the great poles of European art was immediate. In the twelfth century, the artists of the Lombard Lake11 undertook a formidable expansion towards the north, which led them to reach present-day Sweden (then Denmark) and to then return via Poland and Germany. I have already mentioned the key milestones: the primatial cathedral of Lund (1104–1145, culminating around 1130)12; the abbey basilica of Czerwińsk nad Wisła (founded 1148, culminated c. 1155)13; the Ołbin abbey basilica (1172–1200)14; the abbey basilica of St. James in Regensburg (c. 1170–1180)15. To these was added, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the expansion towards Hungary, culminating in the abbey church of San Giorgio in Ják (1214–1256)16. It was a powerful movement, comparable only to the rich activity in Catalonia (San Clemente de Taull, the key church, was consecrated in 1123), which should therefore be read as a parallel alongside the numerous Italian destinations (suffice it, in chronological order from VI to the 13th century, Romagna, Liguria, Tuscany-Lazio, and present-day Emilia); that is to say, the two great “transfers” to Spain and central–northern Europe should be placed according to the trend towards artistic emigration that was typical of the lake inhabitants for centuries. The properly Germanic one seems to be a separate matter, which began shortly after 1135 with the probable presence of master Niccolò in the imperial abbey of Königslutter in Saxony17 and continued with the strong ties between Milan and Cologne in the Swabian age: here too, presences and emigrations occurred, but perhaps a little less systematically.

In the area that interests us, we obviously do not want to maintain that a single group worked for more than a century, but rather that the historical occasion of Lund determined a northern limit to the action of the lakes; since then, we have been led to consider the areas of the Holy Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Poland attractive, and to concretely work for the great religious Orders (Lateran canons regular, Benedictines, Celtic Benedictines). I therefore put forward a hypothesis: a vein from Lund detached itself to reach the offer, evidently rich, for the cathedral of Kijv. The distances are reasonable (from Lund to Kijv; it is about double that from Lund to Regensburg, but from the latter you still have to get to the lake area), but then there are the links with the area, or rather the Varangian recovery of their Scandinavian origins. Jaroslav I had already married Ingegerd and then Astrid, the daughters of Olaf III Skotkonung of Sweden; in general, his dynastic marriages (his sister Mary with Casimir I of Poland18, his daughter Elisabeth with Harald III of Norway, his daughter Anne with Henry I of France, and his daughter Anastasia with Andrew I of Hungary) had created a dense web of ties, in a substantially anti-Germanic function. We could hypothesize that the attempt of the Rjurikidi to contain the Germanic infiltration was translated into artistic emulation, using the same artists also present in the Reich but from a different point of view.

The sculptures now in Muscovite include eighteen pieces: a male head, five metopes and corbels (two anthropomorphic, a sirenid, two zoomorphic), eight capitals, a fragment of a rock, three column bases, and a fragment of jamb or frieze. Head no. 1 (a mature, bearded man with cone-shaped hair: Figure 1) is highly expressive, with stone-graft pupil holes and ample traces of polychromy, to note the expressive hypertrophy of the bulbs in contrast with the severe features of the face. The metopes—definable as such due to the visibility of the support structure—are very different from each other: no. 2 is a female figure with long hair and a decorative border (Figure 2); the similar no. 3 has braids and a simpler border; no. 4 is a lively harpy (Figure 3) with extreme expressiveness and with phytomorphic developments; no. 5 is a leonine corbel with highlighted teeth; no. 6 is a bird in flight (Noah’s Dove?) above a very ruined lion’s protome (Figure 4). The series of capitals is homogeneous in the phytomorphic figuration: no. 7 divides the two acanthus with an oblique volute column culminating in two palmette branches and a central palmette (Figure 5); no. 8 is very similar; no. 9 develops the same motifs but multiplied and made more sumptuous; no. 10 instead insists on the frequent ribs and on the facing acanthus; no. 11 is very similar but worse preserved; no. 12 is from the same series; no. 13 takes up the same motifs with greater vivacity; no. 14 is instead a small capital (Figure 6) with an inverted trapezoidal base with floral blossom and an upper metope framed in Schlaufenornamentik19. The rock fragment no. 15 has a rhomboidal grid filled with palmettes and racemes. The two bases no. 16 and no. 17 are very similar (Figure 7), with the lower level in Schlaufenornamentik and the upper level comprising two angular anthropomorphic heads joined by intertwining. Fragment no. 18 suggests a continuous framed edge and a nimbus with a palmette: it can be pertinent either to a jamb or to the intrados of an architrave.

Essentially, there are some constants: the clear prevalence of phytomorphic data; the anthropomorphic figures of strong expressiveness bordering on the grotesque; the anniversary of the Schlaufenornametik; the theme of the strigilata column. Even with qualitative differences, the material and the technical and typological uniformity of the pieces is evident—witnesses of a single campaign aimed at the interaction between architecture and figuration. Some elements, in addition to this last dialectic, are typically of Lombard Lake artists: the lingering love for weaving, the strigilatura, the neo-Roman acanthus. More precisely, it is the great channel of the artists of the industrious lakes in Pavia20, especially in the large construction sites of the two cathedrals and of San Michele, already completed or in any case paradigmatic by 1130. Then, there are the same reasons (especially for the anthropomorphic dimension) that we find in Czerwińsk and Ołbin: if the hypothesis were correct, we would have in Kijv the first melting pot of the motifs then re-proposed in Poland. Another theme is the relationship with Niccolò21 in particular, not with the Germanic works, but with the obsessive intertwining and hyper-expressive faces of the Portal of the Months in the Sacra di San Michele in Val di Susa (1120/1130), and also in a good part of his production.

The discussion about the first four pieces is more complex. Head no. 1 is the highest moment of the entire cycle: its figurative plasticism is typified in a precise portrait instance, but the absence of hieratic features could suggest a portrait of the client, the grand prince Vladimir II, even if the absence of context must lead to prudence. I note the details of the sloping mustache and the short, pointed beard, which are features that are variegated. The two female heads are united by marked geometry and rigid frontalism; but, they were certainly traits softened by polychromy and perhaps also by the perspective placement. An effective comparison can be established with the plebeian baptismal pool of Chiavenna22: a lake masterpiece from 1156 with the same vigorous and squared heads, moreover with precise references to Czerwińsk and to Samson in the Lund crypt. The outgoing brilliance of the harpy no. 4, on the other hand, can be compared directly to the world of Como, especially to the rear portal of San Fedele (c. 1120) with its articulated teratology. In practice, all the comparative elements refer, yes, to the artists of the lakes, but also to a certain articulation (as in Pavia, Como, Chiavenna) which is obviously based on the common language and frequent exchanges of workers, but suggests a collective enterprise of how reasonable it was—if only in terms of manpower—over great distances. The same goes for the lion figure no. 5 (with possible references to those of the portal of Sant’Abbondio in Como, consecrated in 1095 and moreover the epicenter of the late Schlaufenornamentik) and for the anthropomorphic (or monstrous?) heads nos. 16–17.

It should also be highlighted how the fragments allow us to perceive a very elaborate and serial figuration, such as to qualify the vast space of the cathedral and to be the work of an articulated and ductile company, which perhaps only the Lake artists and Burgundians were able to manage at those dates. The implication is a clear policy of prestige: if, in fact, the grand prince wanted to qualify his state cathedral, the very symbol of Christianity in his lands, he had to create an innovative synthesis23. The mosaics were certainly of high quality and updated in the Comnenian Renaissance, but were also normal compared to the Byzantine space; while the sculptures represented something radically new for the whole macro-area, both formally and typologically as well as in terms of the relationship with the liturgical space. Moreover, this spirit of innovation and openness to complexities was certainly not atypical of the reign of Vladimir II. The son and grandson (in both senses of the term) of the authors of Russkaja Pravda, author of the remarkable text of wisdom that is the Poučen’e, probable commissioner of the final phase of elaboration of the Pověst’ vremęnnych lět (which ended in 1110 and was completed around 1116), proud nephew of the basiléus Constantine IX (apart from the complex problem of the crown today in Budapest), the grand prince, proved to be an open and innovative man, attentive to the Kievan identity, but at the same time eager for new contributions. The choice of the Lombard Lake artists (if the hypothesis holds up) is shrewd both for the quality of the work and the construction site that they guaranteed and for their impartiality with respect to the Germanic world, with which they were also in contact, being fully inserted in Western dynamics.

But, perhaps there is a more subtle political and religious explanation. In the fateful year of 1054, the Russian Church chose Byzantium; but, this implies a relationship with an empire that sees the end of the Macedonians in 1057 and the weak period of the Ducas until 1078—n interlocutor; that is, prestigious but not formidable. The discourse changed from 1081 with the rise of the Comneni, brilliant on the cultural level and aggressive on the military one, and induced the grand prince to maintain the religious union under the banner of Orthodoxy24 but also to distance himself on a political level, almost implying, right down to the onomastic level, that he was the true heir of Monomachus. The change in course could only go in a western direction as, indeed, the dynastic network mentioned above suggests; this too could explain the choice of Lombard Lake artists. This did not lead to liturgical reforms or changes in the sacred space, but it gave it a less Byzantine tone, in perfect parallel with the “crusading” opening of Alexios I two decades earlier, and came to constitute a cornerstone of the early Lombard Lake artists’ presence in Eastern Europe.

Funding

This research received no external funding.

Data Availability Statement

No new data were created or analyzed in this study. Data sharing is not applicable to this article.

Conflicts of Interest

The author declares no conflicts of interest.

Notes

1	For the figurative logic, which has the only possible comparison in the Staatliche Museen (at the time Kaiser Friedrich Museum) in Berlin, see (Datieva 2015).
2	As is well known, a vast historiographical re-reading of these “conversions of the top” is underway which first determine the passage of the Germanic peoples (Burgunds, Visigoths, Lombards…) from Aryan to Catholic Christianity, then of the Slavic and Central European peoples (Bohemians, Hungarians, Poles, …) but also of the Norse from paganism to Christianity; phenomena precisely at the top, involving the royal house and only consequently the court and therefore the population, often with more or less peaceful coexistence of the various groups.
3	The bibliography is very extensive and often repetitive; see the recent (Prelovs’ka 2015). For chronological anticipation is important: (Nikitenko 2011).
4	An excellent summary of historical events in (Codevilla 2016).
5	The general reference is still (Ostrogorsky 1940).
6	Summary and bibliography in (Ravegnani 2004).
7	For Russo-Byzantine marriages cf. (Kazhdan 1989).
8	The most recent monograph, with an extensive bibliography, is Althoff (2009).
9	I think the hypothesis of Sviatopolk II, who dies in that year and would not have had time for a far-reaching campaign, is less plausible.
10	Bibliographic summary in (Nikitenko 2022).
11	On this research area: (Spiriti 2015). I recall for convenience that “artists of the Lombard lakes” indicate those individuals or groups (with precise consortium, construction site, architectural-figurative rules) active in Europe and then in the world from the Sixth to the Twenty-first century. Another point of view in Quirini-Popławski (2007, 2008).
12	After short but important interventions such as (Moltke 1976) or Reuterswärd (1976) (by the same author, Reuterswärd (1987, pp. 2–5)), both in Reuterswärd (1976, pp. 173–79, 229–32), or Pfeiffer (1995), see now Lidén (2003).
13	Bibliography in Twardziak (2019; Nowiński 2020). A global and classical work about romansque sculture in Poland is Świechowski (1990).
14	After the important but dated (Mączewska-Pilch 1973), see now (Chorowska 2012).
15	Important (Strobl 1998) and (Stocker 2001); for the culturale climate see (Reidel 2006).
16	Useful (Dercsényi 1979; Mezey 1999).
17	See now (Lomartire 2013), consulted online.
18	Moreover, Olisava of Poland had married Izyaslav of Kiev.
19	I recall that in Lombardy the theme appears with the Ostrogoths (5th–6th century), triumphs with the Lombards and is re-proposed in Carolingian, Ottonian and then Romanesque forms, up to the threshold of the XIII century.
20	Summary in Mazzilli Savini (1996).
21	See note 11.
22	Bibliography in Rainoldi (2007).
23	Think of the homologous operation of Roger II of Altavilla with the palatine chapel of Palermo, consecrated in 1140.
24	On relations with the Church in the age of Vladimir II see (Der Fastenbrief 1985).

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Figure 1. Man’s head. Gosudarstvenny Istorichesky Muzei, Moscow.

Figure 2. Metope with female head. Gosudarstvenny Istorichesky Muzei, Moscow.

Figure 3. Harpy.Gosudarstvenny Istorichesky Muzei, Moscow.

Figure 4. Bird and lion protome. Gosudarstvenny Istorichesky Muzei, Moscow.

Figure 5. Capital with phytomorphic motifs. Gosudarstvenny Istorichesky Muzei, Moscow.

Figure 6. Capital with phytomorphic and intertwining motifs. Gosudarstvenny Istorichesky Muzei, Moscow.

Figure 7. Base with heads and weaving. Gosudarstvenny Istorichesky Muzei, Moscow.

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