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RUSSIAN 84 SILVER ENAMEL SPOON ST. ISAAC'S CATHEDRAL
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RUSSIAN 84 SILVER ENAMEL SPOON ST. ISAAC'S CATHEDRAL
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RARE 1880'S SAINT ISAAC'S CATHEDRAL RUSSIAN SILVER 84 ENAMELED SPOON. SPOON MEASURES 5 1/4" LONG AND IS IN GREAT CONDITION FOR IT'S AGE.THE ENAMEL LOOKS GOOD WITH LIGHT WEAR SIGNS AS SHOWN IN MY PICTURES. T ARE TWO HALLMARKS, ONE WITH THE HEAD AND NUMBER 84 AND THE SECOND ONE IS LIKE A HC. CYRILIC LETERS. Ostentatious, extravagant and excessive are words that could and probably should be used in describing features of this massive construction, originally designed as the world's largest Orthodox Cathedral. Long before this lavishly decorated building was opened to the public in 1858, St. Isaacs' already had a most unusual history. Peter the Great first commissioned a wooden church on the meadow at the side of the Admiralty in St. Petersburg during 1710. Peter named it after a Byzantine monk St. Isaac of Dalmatia, as he was born on St. Isaac's feast day according to the Orthodox calendar. However, this first church was too close to the river bank and was soon destroyed in floods. Between 1717-27 a second church of this name and having a large multi-tiered baroque bell-tower was built out of stone by Georg Mattarnovi on the spot now occupied by the Bronze Horseman . Mattarnovi was a respected architect, but he failed to design adequate foundations and by the middle of the century, his church walls were heavily cracked and crumbling. A major fire then ended any hope of reconstruction and this church was dismantled, leaving a void for ten years. In 1768 Catherine II decided to have another church/cathedral built on the same site as a monument to honor her hero Peter and she chose Antonio Rinaldi as the architect. Construction began on the site we see today, but this project was fated never to succeed. Rinaldi had other assignments running simultaneously at Gatchina, then Oranienbaum and his complicated marble designs meant slow progress. The church was without an upper storey when Rinaldi fell to his death from scaffolding in 1794, which was two years before Catherine's demise in '96. The new emperor Paul I commandeered the remaining marble for his new Mikhailovsky Castle and he charged Vincenzo Brenna with completing the remaining work on the cathedral using clay bricks. Paul only ruled for 5 years before his life was brutally taken inside his fortified home and his eldest son succeeded him as tsar Alexander I, who soon decided that the two-tone St. Isaacs' was too hideous and the butt of too many crude jokes, so it had to go. In 1809 a national competition was announced for the submission of grandiose designs to replace St. Isaacs' with version number 4.
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