Saint Isaac's Cathedral

← Encyclopedia

Saint Isaac’s Cathedral is the great neoclassical domed church of Saint Petersburg, built between 1818 and 1858 as the principal Orthodox cathedral of the Russian imperial capital. It is dedicated to Saint Isaac of Dalmatia, a Byzantine monk whose feast day coincided with the birthday of Peter the Great; the dedication tied the church, from its founding, to the dynasty that had built the city around it.

The present building is the fourth on the site and the work of the French-born architect Auguste de Montferrand, who gave nearly his whole career to it. Its gilded dome rises above a granite colonnade of monolithic columns quarried and moved by methods that became famous in their own right; the interior is faced in malachite, lapis lazuli, and coloured marble, and decorated with mosaics and paintings on a scale meant to match the cathedrals of the older Christian capitals. The cost and labour were enormous, and the long construction left the building a byword for imperial ambition in stone.

As an Orthodox cathedral, Saint Isaac’s was the setting for the liturgy of the Eastern Church — the divine services, the veneration of icons, the great feasts of the Russian calendar — and it stood near the centre of the state religion of the Romanov empire. After the Revolution the Soviet authorities closed it to worship and, in 1931, reopened it as a museum, for a time an anti-religious one; a Foucault pendulum was hung from the dome to demonstrate the rotation of the earth. Regular services resumed only in 1990, and the building remains both a museum and, on occasion, a working church, its status periodically disputed.

Its place in esoteric discussion is slighter and largely interpretive. The cathedral has drawn the kind of speculation that attaches to many grand nineteenth-century buildings — claims of Masonic intent or hidden symbolism in its proportions and ornament — but these belong to later readers rather than to any documented programme, and historians treat them with caution. What the building reliably preserves is something less hidden: a late and confident statement, in borrowed classical forms, of Orthodox Christianity allied to a modern state. The dynasty it was meant to glorify lasted barely sixty years beyond its completion; the gilded dome over the old imperial capital has since been pendulum and altar by turns, and is still neither wholly one nor the other.

→ Related: Sacre Coeur · Notre Dame D Amiens · Sainte Chapelle · Speyer Cathedral