What a fabulous day from the great city of Moscow…OK, well, almost fabulous day. Great because I got to check off a few things off my to-do list but not so great because it was another rainy day over the city…
First thing checked off the list today was something that I added once I got here. Our painting instructor strongly suggested that we visit the Old Tretyakov Gallery because it houses the art work of the great Russian painters from pre-20th Century times. The stuff in this museum is just as good as anything you’ll see in any other museum. You just probably won’t recongnise many of the artist because the art world really didn’t start paying attention to Russian art until the past couple of decades.
One of my favorite pieces is a work by Alexander Ivanov (1806-1858) called The Appearance of Christ to the People (The Appearance of the Messiah). It is a massive paint at just under 25ft. wide and 18ft. tall! He spent most of his career (from 1837-1857) dedicated to this one piece creating over 600 smaller drawings and oil sketches of various details. It is an amazing piece of art! You’re not allowed to take photos in the gallery so you’ll just have to live with internet versions where the colors aren't nearly as beautiful…although I did find one with some people in the frame looking at the painting (probably taken from a phone that turned out better than the one I took with my phone). Also, you can see a piano in the corner by the painting so you can get a good idea of the size...Next, we got a back stage tour of the Moscow Art Theatre (MXAT)…totally awesome to see the behind the stage workings after seeing several different shows there. The amount of storage space needed is amazing when you think that they have 24 shows that are playing in repertory on the main stage only, 20 shows on the small stage, and 13 one the ‘New’ stage! I can’t even really begin to explain all the cool things that they can do on that stage…it just boggles my mind. I could talk for a long time about all of it but I’ll limit myself to just one (I know…amazing in and of itself). They have a whole extra stage upstage of the regular stage that has a huge double turn table in it. It’s a central disc with a secondary ring around it and they can both move independently of each other…while the whole stage platform is moving downstage towards the audience! Unfortunately, most of my pictures didn’t turn out so no photos of this.
To top the whole day off…St. Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square!!! Yippee!!! And you can take pictures inside!!! Oh, happy day! Thankfully, since the weather wasn’t the greatest, it wasn’t too busy inside the church so you could move around easily. The only bad part is that most of the iconostasis’ in the chapels are protected behind glass (or Plexiglas) shields so most of my pictures ended up with really bad reflections in them…sad face… So for pictures I’m posting a photo of the shrine over St. Basil’s burial place and part of a wall showing some of the various ways that St. Basil’s has been painted in the past. Did you know that the red brick façade is really just painted red and not the natural brick color? Well, you do now. Also, interesting note…When Napoleon took over the city in 1812; he ordered that the Cathedral was to be blown up! Thank God that’s one order that never was carried out!Last note for tonight…There is this restaurant just down from the theatre apparently has some amazing hot chocolate and we felt today was a good hot chocolate kind of day so we tried it out. So, they bring you a bowl of steamed milk and a little cup of molten chocolate and you mix them together! Pretty fun if you ask me…although it was kind of pricy for hot chocolate but worth the experience at least once.
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