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CHAMBER OF FACETS
Interior of the Chamber of Facets
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This is the oldest of the surviving buildings in the Great Kremlin Palace, It was built in 1487-91 under the guidance of Marco Ruffo and Pietro Antonio Solario. The chamber was used as the ceremonial throne room. Here great feasts were held, important state occasions celebrated and foreign embassies received. The Moscow state maintained diplomatic relations with the Venetian Republic, Hungary, Germany, Denmark, Persia and Turkey. Here, too, the Assemblies of the Land met (the central estate-representative institutions in Russia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries).
In 1653 the Assembly of the Land met in the Chamber of Facets and unanimously supported the request of Hetman Bogdan Khmelnitsky that the Ukraine be united with Russia. In 1709 Peter the Great celebrated his victory over the army of King Charles XII of Sweden at Poltava, and in 1721 the conclusion of the Treaty of Ny-stadt with Sweden.
One-pillar hall of the Chamber of Facets
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The main facade of the Chamber of Facets is faced with diamond-pointed rustication in which each stone has four facets. Hence the chamber's name. Architectur-ally it is similar to an old Russian dwelling house. The two-storey building rests on a high semibasement. The ground floor contained domestic rooms, and the upperstorey consists of a ceremonial hall with two rows of windows and a vestibule. The hall has a vaulted ceiling and eighteen windows. It is about five hundred square metres in area and nine metres high. As in many monastery refectories of that period, the vaulting is supported by a rectangular pier in the middle-
Interior of rooms in the Tsar's Apartments
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The chronicles say that at the end of the sixteenth century the interior of the Chamber of Facets was painted with "everyday" pictures, that is, subjects containing scenes of secular life at that time.
At the beginning of the 1880s the walls of the Chamber of Facets were painted by Palekh artists under the Belousov brothers, using inventories compiled by the Tsar's icon-painter Simon Ushakov. These frescoes are of greater historical than artistic value, because the Belousovs followed the descriptions carefully and reproduced the subjects of the original painting taken from the Bible and Russian history. This is an artistic interpretation of the stories about the Creation, the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, about St. Joseph the Beautiful, and the Old Testament King Solomon and King David, and the parable of the just and unjust judges- In the spaces between the windows are conventional portraits of Russian princes. The Orthodox Church forbade the portrayal of live people, so we do not know what the Russian and Moscow princes and tsars looked like before Ivan the Terrible's son Theodore, in whose reign (1584-98) this ban was lifted. One of the scenes shows Prince Vladimir Monomachos of Kiev being presented with gifts and regalia from Emperor Constantine of Byzantium.
On the south wall Tsar Theodore, son of Ivan, is shown surrounded by boyars and clergy. He is sitting on a throne in royal robes holding a sceptre and orb. On his right stands Boris Godunov, who actually ruled Russia in Theodore's name.
In Soviet times a great deal of restoration work has been done in the Chamber of Facets. The carving of the white-stone portal has been restored, the gilded foliate ornament which originally adorned the central pier has been renovated from specimens discovered recently, and the painting has been cleaned.
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