A photo from open sources
In the Hermitage, which is located in St. Petersburg, is amazing in beauty Big Kolyvan vase, which is popularly more often called the Queen of Vases. The explanation is very simple: in front of you a real masterpiece of stone-cutting art of the first half of the XIX century, since the vase is made of a huge block of a beautiful jasper stone with very interesting greenish-wavy vein patterns.
Amazing in this masterpiece is not only beauty, but also its size. The queen of vases has an external diameter of more than 5 meters and its height is 2.5 meters, and this unique exhibit of the Hermitage weighs 19 tons. Not it is surprising that every visitor to the Petersburg museum who sees this a miracle of miracles, not only the beauty of a huge vase from magnificent jasper, but also its some unrealistic sizes, why exclamations burst of people, like: you need what were before stone masters!
The riddle of making the Big Kolyvan vase
Indeed, the Big Kolyvan vase, according to written evidence, manufactured in the period from 1829 to 1849. What the masters in stone cutting were at that time who managed to create so unique and at the same time amazing masterpiece? It’s a long time interests not only ordinary people or art lovers, but also scientists.
A photo from open sources
Interested in because something is required to create such a vase. much more than just talent. As modern say stone cutters, make such a product from a single piece of jasper (coil) is simply unrealistic – it is too fragile for this. More the more beautiful the stone in its pattern, the more fragile. A piece the jasper from which the Queen of the Vases is made, simply amazes heterogeneity (patterning). Even when making a small products from such a coil, 70 percent would go to waste, and at processing such a block of jasper (you can only imagine it), it would certainly split, especially during elliptical the faces that adorned the Big Kolyvan vase.
Researchers went further: they decided to create a small copy Queen of the VAZ, using all modern technologies and opportunities stone cutters. For this purpose, a special sketch was created, in detail and exactly copying a unique museum exhibit, which was It is proposed that the most authoritative stone cutters in Russia pieces of jasper vase just one meter high and half a meter in diameter.
A photo from open sources
And not one of the masters took up this work, because, according to their In opinion, it is simply impossible to fulfill such an order: coil preparation will be spoiled even at the stage of rough processing. It’s even when modern technologies and unique stone cutting machines.
The question is: how did the masters of the first half of the 19th century make the Big Kolyvan vase with the help of the “simplest” tools? There remains only one rational explanation: stone cutters at that time possessed some secret technologies that time have been lost. And we still don’t know how they were made such unique masterpieces, but because we conceive anything, building the most fantastic assumptions, wondering and perplexed. And what it remains to do when no one has applied vases to this Queen a detailed description of how it was made? ..
Time Stones Russia
