Thanks to financial support from Gazprom, the Catherine Palace’s Chapel of the Resurrection designed in the eighteenth century by Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli, is unveiled after four-year restoration by the Amber Workshop of Tsarskoe Selo—the same specialists that brought back to life the Agate Rooms and the Amber Room.
The restored Chapel is showcased as part of Catherine Palace Tour III, which is specially set up for the purpose and also includes Grand Duke Paul’s Rooms of the palace.
Consecrated in 1756 in the presence of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna, the Chapel with three monumental ceiling paintings and 114 icons suffered two fires in 1820 and 1863 and then bombardment and looting during World War Two. Deprived of almost all its icons and the central ceiling paining, it stood in need of large-scale restoration for the last 150 years. After primary conservation work in the early 1950s, the damaged interior still amazed the palace visitors until the late 1990s. Then it was closed and waited for a start of its full restoration (re-creation) project, developed in 1993 by Alexander Kedrinsky and the LenProektRestavratsia Institute.
In 2015, with full financial support from Gazprom, the Museum resumed the project, now revised by Kedrinsky’s pupil Nikolai Ivanov in compliance with the Venice Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites, pursuing maximal preservation of the surviving decorative elements rather than their total replacement.
350 gilders, modelers, carvers and painters worked hard for four years to revive the monument of eighteenth-century architecture.
The restorers uncovered 182 fragments of carved gilt décor, carefully hidden in the altar part. That was probably done in the 1950s by museum workers in hopes that the architectural masterpiece would be revived someday. Painstaking work was carried out to identify the fragments and find out their original places in the church interior. One wing of the Tsar’s Gate was assembled from 54 of the fragments. The hidden treasure also contained some joyful gems: two angel figures from the altar canopy, with their hands and feet detached and preserved. Those crippled victims of World War Two were waiting to see the light for decades. They perfectly fit the surviving details on the canopy, giving the restorers from the Amber Workshop of Tsarskoe Selo a great chance to mend what was once broken by the war.
The surviving painted ceiling canvas in the altar part, Mina Kolokolnikov’s Archangel Gabriel and Archangel Michael icons on Deacon’s Doors of the iconostasis, as well as the rim of the main room’s ceiling canvas, are restored. With only four extant icons on the iconostasis, over forty were repainted by the Fine Arts Academy masters. The lost wall icons were substituted by toned canvases, and such was the lost central ceiling painting which is later expected to be “revived” with a projection.
