ARCHITEKTURA W ROSJI, W POLSCE I NA ŚLĄSKU W XVII I XVIII W.

and Russian architecture was no longer parallel.
Poland that had already been biassed towards
West-European cultural tradition was slowly evol-
ving from the Renaissance to the Baroque and
Neo-Classicism. Russian culture was marked with
complicated processes of the assimilation of the
achievements of the Italian masters and the ela-
boration of genuine stylistic trenc's. It was only by
the end of the 17th century that Russian architec-
ture was cnriched with new elements to draw it
closer to the Northern Renaissance. The above ten-
dency had much in common with the Renaissance
in Poland, the fact being proven by the analysis
of the compositional evolution of gates in Russia
in the 2nd half of the 17th centuiy and Poland
(end of the 16th — early 17th century).
In the mid-17th century two-partite gates with
a bigger entrance for carts and a smaller one for
pedestrians were constructed in Russia, reflec-
ting an old medieval tradition. This is exempli-
fied not only by the lay-out of the Red Tower
over the Holy Gate of the Savino-Storoźevski mo-
nastery at Zvienigorod (1654), built by I. Szarutin
whose art is characterized by a balanced harmony,
but also by the architectonic disposition of the
Front Gate in the tsarist residence of Kołomensko
(1673); its symmetrical silhouette crowned with
a tent dome disharmonizes with the functional
asymmetry of the first tier. Symmetrical three-
arcaded gates (Izmajlovo) began to be constructed
by tsarist artists only at the turn of the 1680s to
be followed by typical lay-outs of monastery and
residence gates, based on the motif of a triumphal
arch, very popular in the West-European Baroque
and Neo-Classicism.
A type of the two-partite gate and portal was
exploited in the Renaissance architecture of Poland
and Germany for a long time. Similarly to the ar-
chitectural practise in Russia in the 2nd half of
the 17th century, Polish architects of the Ist half
of the 16tli century sought ways to harmonize
the decorative-tectonic symmetry of the gate with
the functional asymmetry of the entrances. This
led to a rather bizarre distortion of the gate's
tectonics, e.g. the Piast constructions in Brzeg
(1550) and Legnica (1533). The gate in Legnica,

built by Georg of Amberg, has a lot in common
with the German gates from the 1530s. The prin-
ciple of the two-partite division was also followed
in the lay-outs of the entrance to the bishop's pa-
lace in Bamberg. Three-partite, three-arcaded gates
appeared in Poland only at the beginning of the
17th century. For instance, the Golden Gate in
Gdańsk built by Abraham van den Blocke in 1612
The present survey enables one to conclude that
the Russian architecture of the end of the 17th
century was backward in relation to Central-Euro-
pean architecture by around a century. This can
be seen on the example of sculpted attics of white
stone widespread in Moscow at the end of the 17tli
century; characteristic of the Polish Renaissance of
the 2nd half of the 16th century, they were also
applied in Poland at the beginning of the next cen-
tury as a purely decorative element. Let's em-
phasize here that the style of Late Mannerist attics
which had already lost their constructional impact,
was imported to Russia by the end of the 17th
century. To exemplify the point one ought to
compare the white stone details from the monastery
of the Benedictine Nuns in Lvov (1623) to those
from the Moscow Orthodox church of the Resur-
rection in Kodasze (1695). Even a greater gap
opens between the analogical details from the
town-hall in Chełmno (end of the 16th century)
and the Orthodox church of Pokrow in File from
the 1690s. Undoubtedly, it was White Russian
and Ukrainian architects that were responsible
for the spread of Renaissance traditions of Polisli
architecture; in fact, many of them were active
in Moscow in the 2nd half of the 17th century.
In the early 18th century the evolution Russian
architecture was rapid enougli to follow West-
European patterns established in the Baroque and
Neo-Classical times. This can be seen on the exam-
ple of the superstructure of the Duck Tower in
the Holy Trinity Monastery, where the engraved
designs by Pieter Post, a Dutch arehitect, were
applied. An apparent similarity of the lay-out can
be observed between the Orthodox chureli of St.
Nicholas at Połtievo, admiral Apraksin's residence
near Moscow, and the Holy Trinity chureli in the
Saxon small town of Carlsfeld. Hardly astonishing

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