Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (10 page)

But the journey also provided the princess and her entourage with a tour of Europe’s finest buildings and most gracious courts. From Rome they travelled to Siena (a city to which Sofiya’s father, the dispenser of sacred body parts, had once presented the embalmed hand of John the Baptist), where a reception costing 200 lire (five times the sum recently allocated for a dinner in honour of Lorenzo di Medici) was held for her in the famous black-and-white cathedral. Sofiya continued through Florence and Bologna (where people ‘fought to have the honour of leading her horse’), to Vicenza (della Volpe’s own home city) and the outskirts of Venice. Her party crossed the Alps via Innsbruck and Augsburg and arrived in Nuremberg – one of the finest walled cities in Europe – in early August. The sun on her back would still have been warm as she headed north, more or less in a straight line, via Greussen, Nordhausen, Braunschweig, Celle, Lüneburg and Mölln to the Baltic port of Lübeck, jewel of the north, where she arrived on 1 September.

The contrast between the prosperous charms of northern Europe and the grey world to the east must have been chilling. By the time Sofiya’s party reached Kolyvan (Tallinn), they had endured a stormy eleven-day voyage across the Baltic. Ahead lay two more months of wearying travel, much of it through dense autumnal forest. The crowds now seemed more alien, their curiosity less kind. In Pskov, observers stared at the Italians as if they were some species of fiend. Even the educated ones took exception to the scarlet-clad cardinal, Bonumbre, whose interpretation of his role as papal representative included an undiplomatic devotion to the Catholic cross and a socially disastrous contempt for icons.
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Sofiya was getting a pungent taste of Russian cultural difference. As her retinue finally entered Moscow on 12 November, the light and warmth of Italy must have seemed very far away. As usual, too, it was snowing.
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What must have struck Sofiya most, when she had toured the Kremlin palaces at last, was the gap between what she could see and the splendour that her new husband so clearly thought to be his due. Even if it had been finished, Filipp’s vaunted and expensive building was clearly no match for the Florentine dome. Her own quarters were somewhere in the jumble of wooden buildings below its building-site, and the view was sepia and grey. Ivan was not a great one for apologies, and he would never openly accept that anything he had commissioned was effectively a compromise. In terms of what Russians could do, his builders were already working at full stretch, and the size of his labour-force dwarfed anything that an Italian could raise. In the weeks to come, however, while the delegation wintered in Moscow, the conversation must have turned to what might really be achieved. Sofiya, as a student of Bessarion, was committed to the idea that Moscow could be Europe’s valued ally in the struggle to regain Constantinople. There may have been discussions, too, about the nature of statehood; by 1472, Italy was experimenting with the proposition that government involved far more than feasting, churches and coercive force. The large pool of interpreters worked hard: Filipp, apparently, spent almost every waking hour in theological debate with Bonumbre.
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But the conversation certainly turned to buildings, and from them to Europe’s miraculous new architects. Whatever else, the arrival in the Kremlin of a well-placed and well-educated group from Italy’s most wealthy courts would have dispelled any lingering fear that hiring builders from outside might be a leap into the unknown.

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There really was only one place to go in fifteenth-century Europe if you were after an impressive master-builder. You did not have to be a Muscovite with a new and determined wife. When any prince wanted something gracious, something prestigious, and something that could be expected to stay up, he imported an expert from Italy.
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Filipp might have resisted foreign (Catholic) help, but by the time his great project collapsed he was already dead. The next round was the grand prince’s affair. Just three years after Ivan and Sofiya’s wedding, in 1475, Aristotele Fioravanti, native of Bologna, arrived in Moscow at Ivan’s invitation to offer his services as architect, mint-master, military engineer, deviser of instruments and all-purpose magician.
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The choice suited everyone. Sofiya’s guardian, Bessarion, had known Fioravanti personally for years. When Ivan’s agent, Semen Tolbuzin, travelled to Venice in 1474 to hire a master-builder for the Russian court, he was already primed to recognize the name. Fioravanti’s work was widely celebrated, too, though Tolbuzin’s assumption that he had built the Cathedral of St Mark was overcredulous. His real forte was rescuing monuments and city walls; he had also moved an entire building, the eighty-two-foot tower of Santa Maria Maggiore in Bologna, without damage to the structure. An early commission in Rome had won him the approval of Pope Paul II, and his international fame increased still further in 1467, when he had carried out a project to strengthen Europe’s defences against the Turk on behalf of Hungary’s Italian-educated ruler, Matthias Corvinus.

In 1473, he was invited back to Rome, this time by Sixtus IV, but he was obliged to flee soon after in fear of his life, for he had been accused of forging money, the penalty for which would have involved swallowing molten lead.
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Ivan’s Moscow may well have seemed a better prospect, although the master-builder’s ultimate insurance-policy was an invitation to build a seraglio for the Turkish sultan, Mehmet II. He did not really need to travel far, however. Bologna, or even Venice, would have sheltered him, for engineers of his ability were rare, and the Venetians made sure that Tolbuzin appreciated that as he prepared to lure this one from his homeland. The building task that Tolbuzin outlined must have fascinated the Bolognese master, and the promise of a salary of ten rubles a month was exceptionally generous. As an extra privilege, and a rare one, the architect’s household was offered lodgings in the Kremlin itself.
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Fioravanti was probably about sixty years old when he set off for Moscow with ‘his son, named Andrey, and a boy called Petrushka’.
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Unlike Sofiya, he took the shortest route, a three-month dash across the plains, skirting the frozen Pripet marshes and catching his first glimpse of Ivan’s chilly capital in late March 1475. It was the sort of journey that a man might make in pursuit of a last fast buck, a final commission before retirement. Fioravanti, after all, had come to repair and complete Filipp’s cathedral. He planned to go home a rich man. Instead, when he attempted to leave Russia several years later, he found himself facing a new threat of imprisonment or death. His skills as builder, cannon-founder and military advisor belonged to Moscow for the rest of his life.

That first spring, however, was brisk and professional. Fioravanti inspected the wreck of Filipp’s church and confirmed the Pskov masons’ diagnosis about the mortar. He also insisted, with a healthy Bolognese disdain for Russian workmanship, that the ambitious project could not be achieved unless the soft local limestone were supplemented by copious quantities of brick. By this time, almost everyone in Moscow was observing him, and when he declared that Filipp’s ruined structure would have to go completely, large crowds gathered to watch. Such jobs usually dragged on through a whole season, for Russian builders worked by hand, but the Italian had a machine, a metal-capped oak ram of his own design. The effect could only be compared to Joshua at Jericho. ‘It was miraculous to see’, the chronicle recorded, ‘how it was that something that took three years to build could be entirely demolished by him in a single week, or even less.’ The walls came down so fast that the labourers who had to load the rubble on to clumsy horse-drawn carts scarcely had time to scratch their fleas.
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The next thing was to take a look at Vladimir, for its cathedral, as Ivan and his churchmen insisted, was still to be the model for the Moscow site. To his surprise, on arriving outside the older cathedral, Fioravanti found himself examining a fine – and substantial – building. ‘It must have been the work of our masters,’ he muttered, ever-loyal to his native roots. Despite the contempt implied by that remark, however, he went on to make an extended tour that summer (partly to secure the falcons he had promised to a patron back at home), visiting Novgorod and the remote White Sea monasteries and taking in a landscape that few European travellers had seen since the days of the Vikings. When he returned to Moscow, armed with those falcons and some ermines for himself, he was better informed about the local architecture and ready to start making bricks. But his tour had not entirely changed his view of Russian craftsmanship. He spent his first winter in Moscow setting up his own brickworks, where trainees could be taught to follow his exacting rules. As they discovered, he wanted thousands of flattish, heavy bricks of uniform hardness and uniform size. Even by modern standards, they look huge.

The brick factory at Kalitnikovo was a triumph, and it heralded a series of technical innovations that confirmed the Italian’s reputation as a magician. First, he wanted foundations that could have swallowed a full-grown elephant. The men kept digging till they were fourteen feet deep, and then they packed the trenches with oak stakes. While some laboured with the new bricks, others were taught to make a marvellous mortar, far thicker than the formula that they had used before; the Italian issued them with metal spades to work it with, another innovation. His walls were to be built of pale cream stone, but this was cut and laid without the usual rubble-filling. The building seemed finer and lighter-looking as a result, and the magic bricks were so strong and precise that the arches and cupolas appeared to float above it. The architect showed his builders how to brace the structure with metal rods, rather than chunks of oak, and as the walls grew higher he installed a pulley-system for raising the heavy trays of materials.
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His insistence on measurement was remarked on by everyone. In what was sorcery indeed, the locals observed that ‘everything is done by the ruler and compass’. The delicacy of it all, the lightness, seemed miraculous. The finished building was so perfect that it seemed to have been cut out of a single block.

Though the internal decoration would take much longer to complete, Fioravanti’s Dormition Cathedral was formally consecrated by Metropolitan Geronty on 12 August 1479. The Italian had fulfilled his commission in a little less than five years, but he had not quite kept to his original brief, for the church was neither an exact replica of Filipp’s nor of its sacred prototype in Vladimir. It had the same five domes, but they appeared weightless, the same sequence of bays and piers, but executed with unprecedented regularity and precision. Meanwhile, instead of being square, Fioravanti’s building was elongated, and where most Russian cathedrals would have included a choir gallery, this one remained uncluttered, light. The interior space was probably the largest that the Muscovites had ever seen. The effect was definitely Russian, but it had a distinctly European twist.
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For years to come, the fact that Moscow’s most sacred cathedral had been built by a fellow-countryman continued to make Italian visitors to the city feel proud.
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The plan was now to rebuild the whole Kremlin in impressive style. By the time of Fioravanti’s death in 1486, Ivan had the resources to hire the finest specialists, and – thanks to his new links with Europe – the necessary local knowledge. A fresh detachment of Italians duly appeared in Moscow, including cannon-founders, silver-smiths and apprentices from Rome and Venice. The most important member of the group was another builder, Pietro Antonio Solari, a Milanese who was expected to continue the late Fioravanti’s work.
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Experienced and confident, this man soon started to describe himself as the grand prince’s chief architect, but (though distinguished) he was not the only Italian in town. Two others, whom the Russians knew as Marco and Onton Fryazin (Fryazin was not an Italian surname but the generic name that Russians gave to Europeans – ‘Franks’), were already at work when he arrived in 1490, their task to raise a new system of walls and towers round Ivan’s fortress-court.
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In 1493, another Italian, the Lombard Alevisio de Carcano, was hired by Ivan’s hard-working agents, and in 1504 the Crimean khan, Mengli-Girey, sent his fellow-prince a gift in the shape of the master-builder who had just completed a commission for his own palace at Bakhchisarai. The gift was a Venetian, Alevisio Lamberti da Montagnana, and even he was not the last Italian on Ivan’s site.
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With German cannon-founders (they had proved to be the best), Persian smiths, assorted master-builders from Italy and a physician from Venice who called himself Leon the Jew, the Kremlin must have been a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual cauldron. Despite the presence of so many foreigners, however, a few natives of Russia were still working on royal building plans. Their influence was particularly visible around the irregular square that was now dominated by Fioravanti’s cathedral. A team from Pskov replaced Yona’s little Church of the Deposition of the Robe in 1485. Their next commission was the palace Cathedral of the Annunciation. Despite the loss of priceless frescoes, the dilapidated fourteenth-century original was demolished, and for the next five years a modest new brick structure slowly rose on its foundations. But soon the Russians’ building was upstaged. Facing their work across the sacred square, the Cathedral of the Archangel Michael had long served as the burial place of Moscow’s princes, and Ivan III commissioned a replacement in expectation of his own approaching death. The prince never saw the result (he died in 1505, three years before it was finished), but the final building, by Alevisio Lamberti da Montagnana, was spectacular. When it was new, its red brick and white stone facing must have looked almost garish, and some of the imported details – especially the Venetian scallop-shells under the domes – were shocking in the Moscow light. It might be Russia’s royal mausoleum, but this was certainly no patriotic replica. It was beautiful, however, and gracious, and any honest visitor could see it as a synthesis of the cultures that had converged in Ivan III’s Kremlin: Moscow, Vladimir and Pskov on the one hand; Milan, Venice and Constantinople on the other.