The Kolyvan Vase
Kolyvan Lapidary Works, after a design by Avraam Melnikov · 1831 to 1843
An oval bowl of green stone, so large that a dozen people could sit around its rim, rises on a fluted stem in the centre of its own hall. The vase is more than two and a half metres high and more than five metres across, and it weighs about nineteen tonnes. It is carved from a single block of Revnev jasper, a grey-green stone with wavy bands of darker colour, quarried in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia. It is often called the Queen of Vases, and it is the largest vase in the world.
The design is by the architect Avraam Melnikov, who gave the bowl the shape of an ancient Greek krater on a tall base. The stone was found in 1815 and the raw block took hundreds of workers two years to move to the Kolyvan Lapidary Works, where the cutting and polishing took another eleven years, from 1831 to 1843. Look at the surface, where the bands of the jasper run across the bowl like ripples, and at the acanthus leaves and egg-and-dart moulding carved around the base with a precision that hides the enormous labour of grinding hard stone by hand. Then look at the doorways of the room and realise that the vase could never have passed through them.
It was brought to Saint Petersburg by sledge, river barge and horse-drawn cart, a journey of about six months, and delivered in 1843 while the New Hermitage was under construction. It was set in place in 1849 and the walls of the room were finished around it. It has never moved since and never will. Notice the two small support rings between bowl and stem, which carry the weight of the top, and the pale scuffs on the base where visitors have leaned for more than a century and a half.
Did You Know? The vase was installed before the walls of its room were built, because at nineteen tonnes it could never have fitted through a door.
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