HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

MASONRY CHURCHES OF MEDIEVAL CHERNIHIV 375growing influence of Western Romanesque architecture. Romanesquefeatures were manifested most in the whitestone buildings of the Galicianand Vladimir-Suzdalian lands, and to a lesser degree in the brick churchesof the Dnieper region and Volhynia. Under Romanesque influence thefagades of Rus' churches were adorned with arched friezes and cornices,half-columns on pilasters, and whitestone carving. 34The features common in twelfth-century Rus' masonry architecture arealso present in contemporaneous Chemihiv churches. There, as in theentire Dnieper region, which is poor in stone, techniques of brick buildingdeveloped. The Chemihiv churches of the twelfth century have no equal inRus', including Kiev, in the high mastery of brickwork technique and thedurability of their brick and ceramic architectural details. It is noteworthythat Romanesque influence on twelfth-century Chemihiv church architectureappeared more strongly than in Kievan architecture, where Byzantinetraditions predominated. Apparently, the architects from the Romanesque(Catholic) west were invited to work in Chemihiv as they had been broughtto the Galician and Vladimir-Suzdalian lands in the twelfth century. Apeculiarity of Chemihiv churches from the 1120s to the 1180s was the coveringof brick walls with plaster, which was ruled into rectangles in imitationof the ordered whitestone laying of Romanesque buildings. First inChemihiv, and then under its influence in Old Riazan', Rostov, and laroslavl',whitestone carved details were applied in brick buildings. 35 It wasalso from Chemihiv that the practice of encircling the church with tamboursspread across Rus'. 36 ** *David Sviatoslavich, who ruled in Chemihiv from 1097 to 1123, restoredthe princely palace near the Cathedral of the Transfiguration, whose twotowers had been destroyed in the late eleventh or early twelfth century, andcontinued masonry construction there. He built near the Cathedral of theTransfiguration, sometime between 1115 and 1123, 37 the Cathedral of SS.Boris and Gleb, where, according to the "Discourse on Princes," he him-34Cross, Mediaeval Russian Churches, pp. 22-23; Istoriia ukrains'koho mystetstva, 1: 195;Aseev, Arkhitektura, pp. 115- 16; Rappoport, Drevnerusskaia arkhitektura, pp. 20-50.35Arkheologiia SSSR. Drevniaia Rus': Gorod, zamok, selo, ed. B. A. Kolchin (Moscow,1985), p. 164.36Aseev, Arkhitektura, pp. 131 - 136; idem, Dzherela, pp. 152-54.37N. V. Kholostenko, "Issledovaniia Borisoglebskogo sobora v Chernigove," Sovetskaiaarkheologiia (hereafter SA) (Moscow), 1967, no. 2, p. 188.