Frescoes, Graves and a new PM

Restorers working in the Moscow Kremlin’s Uspensky Cathedral (built in the 1470s) have uncovered new fragments of frescoes dating from the late fifteenth century. They are likely either from when the cathedral’s first iconostasis was created, or from 1515, when the cathedral itself was painted.

Frescoes from this period were thought to be completely lost, replaced by the current layer of painting, which dates to the mid-seventeenth century. These are the oldest surviving frescoes from the fifteenth century in the Moscow region. Previously, the oldest representations of the so-called Moscow school were those in Ferapontov Monastery near Vologda, whose Virgin Nativity Cathedral frescoes are the only intact works of painter Dionisy the Wise.

Dionisy and his pupils also worked on the first frescoes in the Uspensky Cathedral, though it is too early to say who painted the newly discovered fragments, which have been hidden for hundreds of years by the iconostasis that was installed in the nineteenth century.