Paradise Garden on Earth and in Heaven

Our visitors have a chance to look at the Garden of Paradise with the eyes of craftsmen and painters who lived from 16th to 21st centuries, learn the images and symbols of Paradise in the Russian icons, discover various concepts of creating a sacred space and compare the Russian and West European visions of Paradise. The exhibition curators have brought together more than 300 art works from over 10 museums and private collection. Among the painters on display we can name Ivan Khrutsky, Vasily Polenov, Konstantin Somov, Boris Anisfeld, Viktor Borisov-Musatov, Mikhail Vrubel, Natalia Goncharova, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Vladimir Tatlin and Robert Falk.

‘We advise our visitors to combine the exhibition tour with a walk around the Kolomenskoe apple gardens laid out as early as the 17th century, in the reign of Tsar Alexey Mikhailovich [Romanov – t/n]. The display at the Sytny Yard permits to see our historical gardens in a new light – as a Paradise-like spot and will fill your walk around Kolomenskoe with new associations. The exhibition space can be thus conceptually expanded as far as the Kazansky, Ascension and Dyakovo Gardens’, notes Marina Lyulchuk, Director of the Kolomenskoe Museum-Reserve.

The display falls into three thematical sections: Paradise on Earth, Paradise in Heaven and In an Earthly Search for Paradise. The curators have skillfully combined three different images of Paradise: the Old Testament Garden of Eden, the New Jerusalem described by St. John the Theologian in the Book of Revelation and an ordinary earthly garden created by man following his spiritual ideal. The first thematic section features some masterpieces from the Kolomenskoe Museum collection. For instance, Holy Doors (the doors separating the Orthodox church altar from the rest of its space) decorated by scenes of Creation of Man and expulsion of the first people from the Garden of Eden, the magnificent authentic gilded portal, almost 4 meters high, coming from the Transfiguration Cathedral of the Solovetsky Monastery, and fragments of white stone décor adorned by symbolical bas-reliefs, for instance, those of the Lion and Unicorn Standing Before the Tree of Life. This part of the exhibition offers various versions of the Garden of Eden geographic location and its numerous interpretations in art, starting from icon painting and ending by the Russian avant-garde movements. The State Tretyakov Gallery contributed to the display with a number of paintings from the Biblical series by Natalia Goncharova that echo the earthly landscapes of the same author presented in the Earthly Seach for Paradise section.

The display visiting route follows the Biblical chronology. The expulsion plot is followed by prophecies about the salvation of man and the story of the Heavenly Paradise that differs much from the blossoming garden originally created on earth. The dedicated section of the exhibition presents the Heavenly Paradise described by St. John in the Book of Revelation. In its various representations, you can see the Virgin Mary, or the ‘new Eve’, surrounded with flowers. Jesus Christ is drawing Adam out of the Underworld by the hand and Dismas (in the Russian tradition known as Rakh), the Penitent Thief, is the first of all humans to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

A separate section of the exhibition is dedicated to various concepts of creating a sacred space popular in the 17th century, among them construction of Kolomenskoe Palace after the house of the Biblical King Salomon, foundation of the New Jerusalem Monastery as an attempt to bring the image of the shrines of Palestine to the Russian soil and laying out a garden and a menagerie on the Izmailovo Island as an allusion to the Garden of Eden. You will learn by what means old-time architects managed to create an illusion of a heavenly world on earth and what architectural layout corresponded to the Middle-Age ideas of Paradise.

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