The Old Russian style: rethinking Hellenistic and Byzantine traditions

Abstract

The purpose of the article refutes the opinion that the Old Russian style inherited the traditions of metropolitan Byzantine architecture, creatively reinterpreting them, which was established in the literature since the 50s of the twentieth century. The differences from Constantinople architecture were often treated as the original features of the Old Russian architecture. Nowadays, on the basis of excavations and systematization of the history of architecture of that time, scientists prove that the monumental architecture of Kievan Rus’ took the traditions of the Byzantine provinces, which were significantly different from the capital ones. The original Old Russian style was shaped only by the end of the XII century in the work of Miloneg with his aggrandized pyramidality of both interiors and the facade. Its origins occur not in the folk wooden architecture, but in the general tendencies of the development of the world architecture. The article shows the transformation of the Old Russian style under the influence of Gothic and Renaissance tendencies in the ХV century in the western Ukrainian lands.