Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral

Restoration is now continuing at Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral. Workers are removing the partitions and floors that adapted the former church for exhibition halls, stripping away later paint, and uncovering fragments of old paintings. This work is restoring an interior that once changed the fate of two artists.

The cathedral was built as the main church of the Perm Eparchy—the one where the bishop served. Its name was inherited from Pyskorsky Transfiguration Monastery, which was transferred to the new city of Perm by decree of Catherine the Second. “Spas” here means Christ, while the Transfiguration is the Gospel event when the apostles Pyotr, Iakov, and Ioann saw their teacher in divine radiance. The imperial decree specifically ordered that the transferred monastery retain its former name.

In eighteen forty-five, the main body of the cathedral was painted by Nikolai Kozakov and Pyotr Lodeyshchikov. Both were born at Chermoz Plant and belonged to the Lazarev family as serfs. From childhood, they studied under the plant's icon painter. Painting churches and manor houses was their trade, but their patrons, places of work, and their own future paths were chosen for them.

Kozakov and Lodeyshchikov painted icons here and took part in creating large compositions on the walls and beneath the dome. The cathedral depicted the Last Judgment, the Resurrection of Christ, the prophet Iezekiil among human bones, Moisey before the people, and the apostle Pyotr. The work required the skill of an academically trained painter, yet the masters had no more rights than the Lazarev family's other serfs. They could not even enroll to study without their owner's consent.

In the same year, Maximilian, Duke of Leuchtenberg—the president of the Imperial Academy of Arts—passed through Perm while seeking talented students. In the cathedral, he saw the images painted by Kozakov and Lodeyshchikov. After returning from the trip, the duke wrote to Ivan Lazarev, who owned the artists. He explained that both had evident talent and could become good masters at the Academy. One obstacle remained: the law allowed them to be admitted only after their release from serfdom.

Leuchtenberg asked Lazarev to grant both men their freedom. The owner agreed. Kozakov and Lodeyshchikov went to St Petersburg, entered the Academy, and in eighteen fifty graduated with the official title of artists of historical and portrait painting. The images they had painted at another's command gave the president of the Academy grounds to demand that their authors be granted the right to decide for themselves.

From nineteen thirty-two, the cathedral housed the Perm State Art Gallery. When additional floors and halls were installed, part of the old decoration was destroyed, while the surviving paintings were covered with layers of paint. The gallery vacated the building at the end of two thousand twenty-three. Restorers are now again finding paintings beneath the later coating, but for now they cannot confidently distinguish the work of Kozakov and Lodeyshchikov from the brushwork of other masters. The archives have preserved a precise answer: the artists' freedom was requested specifically after their images had been seen here.