“In the summer of 1843, during Solntsev’s stay in Kyiv, a discovery in the Kyivan St. Sophia led to one of the most thorough and most barbarous restorations undertaken during the reign of Nicholas I. One could observe the remains of medieval painting under the crumbling plaster on the ground floor of the cathedral, which gave ample grounds to presume its existence in other parts of the building as well. When Solntsev, began to make sampled cuttings, he found remains of the eleventh-century frescoes, contemporary with the cathedral’s mosaics, wherever he chipped off new plaster. He decided to uncover the surviving frescoes and to paint the walls anew in keeping with the original style, in those places where the frescoes had been lost. Solntsev reported on the project to the emperor who sent his report to the Synod. After a committee was set up, Nicholas granted permission for the restoration of the cathedral and the frescoes. It is known that the frescoes of the Kyivan St. Sophia had long remained unretouched. Despite the loss of considerable parts and even entire compositions in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when the church was neglected and semi-ruined, the frescoes were still in evidence in Petr Mogila’s day (1632–47), and the gradual whitewashing of the painted area and its renovation did not start until the close of the seventeenth century Master-craftsmen, engaged by Metropolitan Philaret of Kyiv, and the restorer Focht, who implemented Solntsev’s program, first had to remove the accretions of the previous century, which had no historic and aesthetic value. This work was completed within two years (1844–45). Apart from the frescoes located in the stairway towers, their work uncovered a total of twenty-five compositions, 220 full-length representations of saints, 108 half-length figures, and a large number of ornamental patterns.18 No other fresco cycle of that scale had been found in Western or Eastern Europe at that time. Despite the losses and the wear and tear to the paint layer caused by the ravages of time and the rough cleaning techniques used by Metropolitan Philaret’s workmen and the master-restorer Focht, the best way to preserve the remaining frescoes of the Kyivan St. Sophia would have been to leave them completely intact. However, the tastes of the nineteenth century demanded that all the damaged areas be repaired and the wall painting restored to its “full undamaged integrity.” With this in view, Solntsev invited to Kyiv the St. Petersburg master, M. S. Peshekhonov, whom he already knew to “be fairly good at icon painting and retouching old icons.” Peshekhonov pledged himself to “refrain from altering the ancient outlines,” promising to “retouch the lost areas in such a way as to make the repair unnoticed” (zapravliat’ utrachennye mesta tak, chtoby zapravka ne byla zametna), whereupon in the summer of 1848 he set to work. On being informed that Peshekhonov was a noted Old Believer, Metropolitan Filaret (Philaret) kept watch over the artist lest he make any uncanonic additions to the painting under restoration. He placed Peshekhonov’s work under secret surveillance and finally exposed him for trying to alter the drawing and color scheme. It also turned out that, in order to speed up the progress of work, Peshekhonov had hired a team of the “most uncouth dissenters,” who were ignorant of the art of medieval painting and, in addition, utilized low-quality factory-made paints for renovating the frescoes. There was no doubt that the accusations against Peshekhonov were based on factual evidence since, no less than a year later, the restored frescoes became moldy and darkened. In 1850, Filaret succeeded in cancelling the contract with Peshekhonov, but by that time his masters had managed to “restore” about one-third of the uncovered frescoes, i.e., 100 full-length figures, forty-four half-length figures, and 127 ornaments.
Having dismissed Peshekhonov, the committee supervising the cathedral’s restoration invited Father Irinarkh, the hieromonk from Orel who had renovated the paintings of the Monastery of the Caves in Kyiv, to serve in his place. Irinarkh arrived at St. Sophia with the team of monk-iconographers that he had gathered earlier and, in 1850–51, he repainted another third of the frescoes. In P. G. Lebedintsev’s words, “the work proceeded quite fast.” Nicholas, who regularly visited Kyiv and personally supervised the course of the restoration of the cathedral’s frescoes, even distinguished Irinarkh with his imperial graces. But this time, too, the metropolitan and the committee considered it expedient to replace the executing artist. Petr Lebedintsev, who recorded the saga of the cathedral’s renovation while its participants were still alive, commented that Irinarkh’s removal came about because of his “willful treatment of the fresco painting and his stubbornness, which not only amounted to an unwillingness to obey Solntsev’s instructions but also defiance of the criticism of the metropolitan. After having his works approved by the emperor, Father Irinarkh began to put on airs and was then removed.”
The completion of the restoration was entrusted to the cathedral’s priest, I. R. Zheltonozhskii, who far outstripped both Peshekhonov and Father Irinarkh in the pace of repairing the old frescoes and, especially, of painting new ones. In the words of N. V. Zakrevskii, who came to Kyiv a few years later and obtained information directly from the craftsmen engaged in the restoration, Zheltonozhskii had set himself to completing the work with the “assistance of his forty apprentices.” Within three years, from 1851 through 1853, he managed to restore all the frescoes that adorned the stairway towers of the cathedral, among other things.
In general, this is the factual record of the restoration of the eleventh-century paintings in the Kyivan St. Sophia. The inadequate understanding of preservation aims, the hiring of casual contractors and unskilled workmen for the cleaning and renovation of frescoes, the poor control over the entire process, and the haste with which the job was done could not but play a fatal role in the history of one of the oldest monuments of painting in Russia. With the exception of the frescoes in the chapel of St. Michael, which were preserved unretouched as a keepsake for posterity, scores of large-scale compositions and hundreds of detached figures and half-figures of saints, ornaments, and other decorative motifs were crudely repainted with oils within a period of five years. At the first stage of the process, in order to achieve better cohesion with the newly laid paint, the uncovered frescoes were coated with a layer of drying oil, which deeply penetrated not only the paint layer itself but the priming of the eleventh-century wall. Rather than being fixed, the poorly held fragments were knocked off to make room for the hackwork of renovators. A number of images were entirely painted anew. At the formal consecration on October 4, 1853, viewers of the St. Sophia did not behold newly uncovered medieval frescoes but paintings that had very little in common with the art of the eleventh century. Even for the mid-nineteenth century, when principles of scientific conservation were still in formation, the renovation of the St. Sophia frescoes was nothing less than an act of vandalism that caused irreparable harm. The supervisory committee, created by the joint efforts of Nicholas I and the Synod, consisted solely of clerics and government officials who were uninformed about art. Only Solntsev, who was in charge, could have channeled it in a proper direction and taken steps to preserve the authentic paintings of the St. Sophia. But as he shared the tastes of the tsar, who imagined himself to be a connoisseur of antiquity, Solntsev did not accomplish even a fraction of what should have been done to salvage the cathedral’s artistic decor. Therefore, it is largely Solntsev who bears the responsibility for the damage to the St. Sophia’s frescoes…
The second edition of Sementovskii’s book (1864), viewed the matter in an entirely different light: “The Academician Solntsev, who supervised the uncovering of medieval wall painting …, while staying in Kyiv but very briefly during the summer seasons and being rather remotely acquainted with archaeology, could neither physically nor morally perform the duty he was entrusted with …. We can even say that the medieval wall painting of the Kyivan St. Sophia has suffered twice: first, when it was whitewashed, and, second, when the layers of plaster were rubbed off by common workmen who were hired as day laborers and had not the least idea of any kind of painting, to say nothing of frescoes …. We personally witnessed how these precious depictions—having come down to us through the centuries in a perfect state of preservation, with all their features and bright colors intact—were disappearing under the iron scrapers of these vulgar artists. All this happened because there was no real manager who was familiar with archaeology and conversant with medieval wall painting.” Even such a loyal and officially-minded writer as A. N. Murav’ev noted, “It would be tedious and even useless to record all the frescoes after their renovation.” “When one first looks at this restoration,” continues another author, “it appears that the Church of St. Sophia has been painted anew, and one has to search for antiquity; [this is so] because it was easier to lay the paint over the whole background or the draperies of a saint than to gradually make the coloring tally with the original, which would require time, patience, and knowledge.” Particular regret was expressed with regard to the frescoes with subjects from the life of the Byzantine imperial court, which were torn off the walls of two stairway towers leading to the gallery: “… none of the other frescoes of this church perhaps suffered so much under the scrapers of workmen on their uncovering and also during the renovation when they were buried under the new paint layers as these symbolic representations ….” An even more bitter criticism was voiced by a noted advocate of the antiquity, archaeologist and painter V. A. Prokhorov: “All the frescoes are doctored, retouched, and have figures painted anew in many areas which tally but little with the former ones. Some images, in the places where their legends were rubbed off, have totally different inscriptions, some of which are arbitrary, others utterly out of place, so that a male figure may be interpreted as a female one, and vice versa. Thus, all the frescoes have, one way or another, lost their original aspect.” (The Artist-Archaeologist F. G. Solntsev and the Artist-Restorer N. I. Podkliuchnikov, Brill, 2018)
The Lady in the fresco in the title image holds a ball of thread in her hands. Could there be a connection to the Ariadne story? Read
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