The church architecture of Rus’ and Muscovy, grown from Byzantine models after the conversion of 988: cubic, many-domed churches whose domes rise on tall drums and swell into onion shapes, walls crowned by rounded gables (zakomary), rising tiers of decorative arches (kokoshniki), and in the sixteenth century the soaring tented church.
Prince Vladimir of Kyiv accepted Orthodox Christianity from Byzantium in 988, and Greek masters came north to build. The cathedral of St Sophia in Kyiv (begun in the 1030s) is a Byzantine cross-in-square multiplied (five aisles, galleries and thirteen domes), and St Sophia in Novgorod (1045–1050) adapted the type to a colder climate with thick walls, small windows and steep roofs. From the start the Russian church was vertical: a compact cubic body with domes lifted high on cylindrical drums so that they could be seen across a town and a landscape.
In the principality of Vladimir-Suzdal in the twelfth century builders worked in fine white limestone. The Church of the Intercession on the Nerl (1165) is a single-domed cross-in-square of perfect proportions, its walls divided into bays by pilaster strips and crowned by semicircular gables (zakomary) that follow the barrel vaults inside, its surfaces carved with blind arcades and reliefs. The zakomara roofline, with the drum rising from its centre, became the classic silhouette of the Russian church.
When Moscow gathered the Russian lands, Ivan III brought the Bolognese engineer Aristotele Fioravanti to rebuild the Dormition Cathedral in the Kremlin (1475–1479): a spacious hall with five domes over equal bays, Italian in its engineering and Russian in its form. In the sixteenth century a native invention appeared: the tented church, in which a tall octagonal masonry tent (shatyor) replaces the dome, as at the Church of the Ascension at Kolomenskoye (1532), probably a translation into brick of timber church towers. St Basil’s on Red Square (1555–1561) clusters nine chapels, tents and onion domes into a single fantastic mountain.
The onion dome (a bulbous outer shell swelling beyond its drum and drawn up to a point, usually of timber sheathed in metal and often set over a lower structural vault) became universal from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, gilded or painted in bright colours. Seventeenth-century Moscow churches such as the Trinity in Nikitniki pile up tiers of kokoshniki, pointed decorative gables, round the drums and cover their walls with carved brick and coloured tiles. The Church authorities discouraged the tent roof in the 1650s, and in timber the tradition culminated in the twenty-two domes of the Transfiguration church at Kizhi (1714). The reforms of Peter the Great turned Russian architecture toward Western Europe, but the domed silhouette survived as a national form and was revived in the nineteenth century.