The Museum of Architecture opens a permanent exhibition "Kalyazin. Frescoes of the Flooded Monastery"

The Shchusev State Museum of Architecture presents a new permanent exhibition “Kalyazin. Frescoes of the Flooded Monastery ", dedicated to the results of many years of work on the study and preservation of the unique collection of fresco paintings of the Trinity-Makariev Monastery.

The Trinity Makaryev Monastery was founded by the Monk Makarii Kalyazinsky in 1434 and was one of the richest and most revered in Russia. The monastery was visited by Ivan the Terrible, Boris Godunov, Alexei Mikhailovich. The frescoes of the Trinity Cathedral presented at the exhibition were created by tsarist icon painters, known for the best painting cycles of the first half of the 17th century in the Moscow Kremlin and Zvenigorod.

The monastic ensemble was destroyed and flooded in 1940 during the creation of the Uglich reservoir, but fragments of the wall painting were rescued by the expedition of the Academy of Architecture. Under the guidance of the artist-restorer P.I. Yukin, in January-February 1940, at temperatures reaching - 32 126, 126 fragments of murals with a total area of 185 square meters were removed from the walls of the Trinity Cathedral. m, 117 of them were transferred to the State Research Museum of Architecture, about 30 were sent to other museum collections, including the collection of the former Stroganov School.

The exposition of the Museum of Architecture is devoted, on the one hand, to the history of the destroyed Kalyazin Trinity-Makaryevsky Monastery, on the other, to the activities of the Museum to save and restore unique murals. The frescoes selected for the exhibition include Old Testament scenes, an apocryphal cycle about the birth of the Virgin, scenes from the Christological cycle and the Apocalypse, as well as images of holy princes. In particular, the public will be shown lifetime portraits of Alexei Mikhailovich and Maria Ilyinichna, fragments of chronicles, ornaments, frescoes "Expulsion from Paradise", "Construction of the Tower of Babel", "New Jerusalem", "Washing of feet", "A pale horse and a black horse", "Savior on the throne" and others.

The exposition will also present models of the Trinity Cathedral and the monastery refectory (the author of the models is the architect Ivan Leonidov), drawings showing the buildings of the monastery at the time of 1939, and documentary evidence of the activities of the expedition of the Academy of Architecture, including a diary with observations, photographs. A separate section of the exhibition will tell about the scientific restoration of frescoes based on the author’s technique of V.P. Bury and carried out in different years by the restorers of the Moscow State Art and Industry Academy named after S.G. Stroganov.