David Grimm
Encyclopedia
David Ivanovich Grimm was a Russian
architect, educator and historian of art of Byzantine Empire
, Georgia
and Armenia
. Grimm belonged to the second generation of Russian neo-Byzantine architects
and was the author of orthodox
cathedrals in Tbilisi
, Chersonesos and smaller churches in Russia and Western Europe
. Grimm was a long-term professor at the Imperial Academy of Arts
and chaired its Department of Architecture in 1887-1892.
in Saint Petersburg
. He completed the class of Alexander Brullov
at the Imperial Academy of Arts
in 1841-1848. His graduation honours entitled Grimm to take an Academy-sponsored study tour of Italy and France, but it was cancelled due to the revolutions of 1848
in Europe
. Rather than waiting till the end of hostilities, Grimm opted for a study tour of the Caucasus
(1849–1850) that exposed him to the wealth of vernacular Georgian and Armenian architecture. In 1852–1855 Grimm travelled to Asia Minor
, Italy
and Greece
, studying the Byzantine relics. These studies were summarized in Grimm's 12-volume Monuments of Byzantine architecture in Georgia and Armenia (1859–1856) and subsequent works. Grimm became a professor of the Institute of Civil Engineers in 1856 and at the Academy in 1859.
In 1858 empress Maria Alexandrovna commissioned Grimm to design the cathedral in Chersonesos, on the site of a Greek church where Vladimir I of Kiev
was baptized in 988. Construction of the cathedral commenced before the Crimean War
to the design by Konstantin Thon
; after the war, his design was discarded and work began from scratch. Maria's choice was influenced by another Byzantine scholar, Grigory Gagarin
. Grimm's design was approved in June 1859 and displayed to the public the next year. Unlike contemporary Byzantine architects, Grimm based his draft on Georgian legacy, employing polygon
al surfaces instead of Byzantine cylinders and domes. Construction started in 1861 and, despite royal sponsorship, proceeded very slowly: the structure was completed in 1876, and the interiors in 1897. Chersonesos cathedral remained a sole example of the Georgian line in Byzantine revival until it reappeared shortly before World War I
.
The other commission of the Romanovs, a Byzantine chapel in Nice
commemorating the late Nicholas Alexandrovich, was completed in less than two years, 1866–1868). In the next twenty years Grimm designed numerous Orthodox "embassy churches" in Geneve, Copenhagen
and Jerusalem; according to the state preference, they were executed in the Russian Revival
theme of 17th century Yaroslavl
architecture.
In 1865 Grimm and Robert Gedike jointly took part in the contest to design a new cathedral in Tbilisi
but lost to Victor Schroeter and Alexander Huhn. Schroeter-Huhn proposal, if executed, would have been the largest Neo-Byzantine structure of its time. The client - viceroy of the Caucasus
Mikhail Nikolayevich - dismissed the Schroeter-Huhn proposal as too expensive; he supported the Grimm-Gedike draft but instructed the architects to decrease its size to cut costs. The building that was completed in 1871-1897 followed the original Russian scheme of a single dome with four symmetrical apse
s created by Roman Kuzmin in 1861, yet Grimm changed his proportions to create a tall, vertical silhouette
. Grimm's draft, publicised in 1860s, paved the road to numerous variations of the same single-dome layout and was perfected by Vasily Kosyakov in 1880s.
Grimm's last design, the burial vault of Grand Dukes in Peter and Paul Fortress
, remained on paper: after Grimm's death, the project was taken over by Antony Tomischko, who also died soon, and the Vault was redesigned and completed by Leon Benois
in Baroque
style.
David Grimm was buried at Smolenskoe Lutheran Cemetery in Saint Petersburg. His son, Hermann Grimm (1865–1942), was also a successful architect; grandson, Hermann Grimm (1904–1959) was an educator and historian of art.
Russian Empire
The Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia and the predecessor of the Soviet Union...
architect, educator and historian of art of Byzantine Empire
Byzantine Empire
The Byzantine Empire was the Eastern Roman Empire during the periods of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, centred on the capital of Constantinople. Known simply as the Roman Empire or Romania to its inhabitants and neighbours, the Empire was the direct continuation of the Ancient Roman State...
, Georgia
Georgia (country)
Georgia is a sovereign state in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded to the west by the Black Sea, to the north by Russia, to the southwest by Turkey, to the south by Armenia, and to the southeast by Azerbaijan. The capital of...
and Armenia
Armenia
Armenia , officially the Republic of Armenia , is a landlocked mountainous country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia...
. Grimm belonged to the second generation of Russian neo-Byzantine architects
Neo-Byzantine architecture in the Russian Empire
Neo-Byzantine architecture in the Russian Empire emerged in the 1850s and became an officially endorsed preferred architectural style for church construction during the reign of Alexander II of Russia , replacing the Russo-Byzantine style of Konstantin Thon...
and was the author of orthodox
Russian Orthodox Church
The Russian Orthodox Church or, alternatively, the Moscow Patriarchate The ROC is often said to be the largest of the Eastern Orthodox churches in the world; including all the autocephalous churches under its umbrella, its adherents number over 150 million worldwide—about half of the 300 million...
cathedrals in Tbilisi
Tbilisi
Tbilisi is the capital and the largest city of Georgia, lying on the banks of the Mt'k'vari River. The name is derived from an early Georgian form T'pilisi and it was officially known as Tiflis until 1936...
, Chersonesos and smaller churches in Russia and Western Europe
Western Europe
Western Europe is a loose term for the collection of countries in the western most region of the European continents, though this definition is context-dependent and carries cultural and political connotations. One definition describes Western Europe as a geographic entity—the region lying in the...
. Grimm was a long-term professor at the Imperial Academy of Arts
Imperial Academy of Arts
The Russian Academy of Arts, informally known as the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, was founded in 1757 by Ivan Shuvalov under the name Academy of the Three Noblest Arts. Catherine the Great renamed it the Imperial Academy of Arts and commissioned a new building, completed 25 years later in 1789...
and chaired its Department of Architecture in 1887-1892.
Biography
David Grimm was born in a Lutheran family and attended the German Saint Peter's SchoolSaint Peter's School
St. Peters is a Catholic elementary school in Brantford, Ontario.The principal is Anne Evanoff. The school has about 125 students from grades K through 8....
in Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...
. He completed the class of Alexander Brullov
Alexander Brullov
Alexander Pavlovich Brullov was a Russian artist associated with the latest phase of the Russian Neoclassicism.Alexander Brullov was born in Saint Petersburg into a family of French artists: his great grandfather, his grandfather, his father and his brothers were artists. His first teacher was...
at the Imperial Academy of Arts
Imperial Academy of Arts
The Russian Academy of Arts, informally known as the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, was founded in 1757 by Ivan Shuvalov under the name Academy of the Three Noblest Arts. Catherine the Great renamed it the Imperial Academy of Arts and commissioned a new building, completed 25 years later in 1789...
in 1841-1848. His graduation honours entitled Grimm to take an Academy-sponsored study tour of Italy and France, but it was cancelled due to the revolutions of 1848
Revolutions of 1848
The European Revolutions of 1848, known in some countries as the Spring of Nations, Springtime of the Peoples or the Year of Revolution, were a series of political upheavals throughout Europe in 1848. It was the first Europe-wide collapse of traditional authority, but within a year reactionary...
in Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
. Rather than waiting till the end of hostilities, Grimm opted for a study tour of the Caucasus
Caucasus
The Caucasus, also Caucas or Caucasia , is a geopolitical region at the border of Europe and Asia, and situated between the Black and the Caspian sea...
(1849–1850) that exposed him to the wealth of vernacular Georgian and Armenian architecture. In 1852–1855 Grimm travelled to Asia Minor
Asia Minor
Asia Minor is a geographical location at the westernmost protrusion of Asia, also called Anatolia, and corresponds to the western two thirds of the Asian part of Turkey...
, Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
and Greece
Greece
Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....
, studying the Byzantine relics. These studies were summarized in Grimm's 12-volume Monuments of Byzantine architecture in Georgia and Armenia (1859–1856) and subsequent works. Grimm became a professor of the Institute of Civil Engineers in 1856 and at the Academy in 1859.
In 1858 empress Maria Alexandrovna commissioned Grimm to design the cathedral in Chersonesos, on the site of a Greek church where Vladimir I of Kiev
Vladimir I of Kiev
Vladimir Sviatoslavich the Great Old East Slavic: Володимѣръ Свѧтославичь Old Norse as Valdamarr Sveinaldsson, , Vladimir, , Volodymyr, was a grand prince of Kiev, ruler of Kievan Rus' in .Vladimir's father was the prince Sviatoslav of the Rurik dynasty...
was baptized in 988. Construction of the cathedral commenced before the Crimean War
Crimean War
The Crimean War was a conflict fought between the Russian Empire and an alliance of the French Empire, the British Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Sardinia. The war was part of a long-running contest between the major European powers for influence over territories of the declining...
to the design by Konstantin Thon
Konstantin Thon
Konstantin Andreyevich Thon, also spelled Ton was an official architect of Imperial Russia during the reign of Nicholas I. His major works include the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the Grand Kremlin Palace and the Kremlin Armoury in Moscow....
; after the war, his design was discarded and work began from scratch. Maria's choice was influenced by another Byzantine scholar, Grigory Gagarin
Grigory Gagarin
Prince Grigory Grigorievich Gagarin was a Russian painter, Major General and administrator.-Noble youth:Grigory Gagarin was born in Saint Petersburg to the noble Rurikid princely Gagarin family. His father, Prince Grigory Ivanovich Gagarin , was a Russian diplomat in France and later the...
. Grimm's design was approved in June 1859 and displayed to the public the next year. Unlike contemporary Byzantine architects, Grimm based his draft on Georgian legacy, employing polygon
Polygon
In geometry a polygon is a flat shape consisting of straight lines that are joined to form a closed chain orcircuit.A polygon is traditionally a plane figure that is bounded by a closed path, composed of a finite sequence of straight line segments...
al surfaces instead of Byzantine cylinders and domes. Construction started in 1861 and, despite royal sponsorship, proceeded very slowly: the structure was completed in 1876, and the interiors in 1897. Chersonesos cathedral remained a sole example of the Georgian line in Byzantine revival until it reappeared shortly before World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
.
The other commission of the Romanovs, a Byzantine chapel in Nice
Nice
Nice is the fifth most populous city in France, after Paris, Marseille, Lyon and Toulouse, with a population of 348,721 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Nice extends beyond the administrative city limits with a population of more than 955,000 on an area of...
commemorating the late Nicholas Alexandrovich, was completed in less than two years, 1866–1868). In the next twenty years Grimm designed numerous Orthodox "embassy churches" in Geneve, Copenhagen
Copenhagen
Copenhagen is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban population of 1,199,224 and a metropolitan population of 1,930,260 . With the completion of the transnational Øresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region...
and Jerusalem; according to the state preference, they were executed in the Russian Revival
Russian Revival
The Russian Revival style is the generic term for a number of different movements within Russian architecture that arose in second quarter of the 19th century and was an eclectic melding of pre-Peterine Russian architecture and elements of Byzantine architecture.The Russian Revival style arose...
theme of 17th century Yaroslavl
Yaroslavl
Yaroslavl is a city and the administrative center of Yaroslavl Oblast, Russia, located northeast of Moscow. The historical part of the city, a World Heritage Site, is located at the confluence of the Volga and the Kotorosl Rivers. It is one of the Golden Ring cities, a group of historic cities...
architecture.
In 1865 Grimm and Robert Gedike jointly took part in the contest to design a new cathedral in Tbilisi
Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Tiflis
The St. Alexander Nevsky Military Cathedral of Tiflis was an Orthodox Christian cathedral in downtown Tiflis , Georgia, constructed during the Imperial Russian rule in the 1871-1872 and 1889-1897 and demolished by the Soviet authorities in 1930...
but lost to Victor Schroeter and Alexander Huhn. Schroeter-Huhn proposal, if executed, would have been the largest Neo-Byzantine structure of its time. The client - viceroy of the Caucasus
Viceroyalty of the Caucasus
The Viceroyalty of the Caucasus is a term used to denote the Imperial Russian administrative and political authority in the Caucasus region exercised through the offices of glavnoupravlyayushchiy and namestnik...
Mikhail Nikolayevich - dismissed the Schroeter-Huhn proposal as too expensive; he supported the Grimm-Gedike draft but instructed the architects to decrease its size to cut costs. The building that was completed in 1871-1897 followed the original Russian scheme of a single dome with four symmetrical apse
Apse
In architecture, the apse is a semicircular recess covered with a hemispherical vault or semi-dome...
s created by Roman Kuzmin in 1861, yet Grimm changed his proportions to create a tall, vertical silhouette
Silhouette
A silhouette is the image of a person, an object or scene consisting of the outline and a basically featureless interior, with the silhouetted object usually being black. Although the art form has been popular since the mid-18th century, the term “silhouette” was seldom used until the early decades...
. Grimm's draft, publicised in 1860s, paved the road to numerous variations of the same single-dome layout and was perfected by Vasily Kosyakov in 1880s.
Grimm's last design, the burial vault of Grand Dukes in Peter and Paul Fortress
Peter and Paul Fortress
The Peter and Paul Fortress is the original citadel of St. Petersburg, Russia, founded by Peter the Great in 1703 and built to Domenico Trezzini's designs from 1706-1740.-History:...
, remained on paper: after Grimm's death, the project was taken over by Antony Tomischko, who also died soon, and the Vault was redesigned and completed by Leon Benois
Leon Benois
Leon Benois was a Russian architect. He was the son of architect Nicholas Benois, the brother of artists Alexandre Benois and Albert Benois, and the grandfather of the actor Sir Peter Ustinov...
in Baroque
Baroque
The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...
style.
David Grimm was buried at Smolenskoe Lutheran Cemetery in Saint Petersburg. His son, Hermann Grimm (1865–1942), was also a successful architect; grandson, Hermann Grimm (1904–1959) was an educator and historian of art.
Buildings
- Cathedral of Saint Vladimir in Chersonesos (draft 1858-1859, completed 1897)
- Church of Saint Olga in StrelnaStrelnaStrelna is a municipal settlement in Petrodvortsovy District of the federal city of St. Petersburg, Russia, situated about halfway between St. Petersburg proper and Petergof and overlooking the shore of the Gulf of Finland...
(1861–1863) - Completion of German Refomist church in Saint Petersburg (draft 1862 by Yury Bosse, completed 1865)
- Chapel to the memory of late Nicholas Alexandrovich, NiceNiceNice is the fifth most populous city in France, after Paris, Marseille, Lyon and Toulouse, with a population of 348,721 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Nice extends beyond the administrative city limits with a population of more than 955,000 on an area of...
(draft 1866, completed 1868) - Cathedral of Saint Alexander Nevsky, TbilisiAlexander Nevsky Cathedral, TiflisThe St. Alexander Nevsky Military Cathedral of Tiflis was an Orthodox Christian cathedral in downtown Tiflis , Georgia, constructed during the Imperial Russian rule in the 1871-1872 and 1889-1897 and demolished by the Soviet authorities in 1930...
(draft 1865-1870, completed 1897) - Moika Embankment, 42 (Saint PetersburgSaint PetersburgSaint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...
), 1867–1870 - Church of Protection in GatchinaGatchinaGatchina is a town and the administrative center of Gatchinsky District of Leningrad Oblast, Russia, located south of St. Petersburg by the road leading to Pskov...
, completed 1883 - Church of Saint Alexander Nevsky, CopenhagenCopenhagenCopenhagen is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban population of 1,199,224 and a metropolitan population of 1,930,260 . With the completion of the transnational Øresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region...
(completed 1883 by Albert Nielsen)