In the Hermitage, which is located in St. Petersburg, there is an amazingly beautiful Big Kolyvan vase, which is popularly called the Queen of Vases. The explanation is very simple: before you is a real masterpiece of stone-cutting art of the first half of the 19th century, since a vase is made of a huge lump of the most beautiful jasper stone with very interesting greenish-wavy vein patterns.
Not only beauty, but also its size amazes in this masterpiece. The Queen of Vases has an outer diameter of more than 5 meters and her height is 2.5 meters, and this unique exhibit of the Hermitage weighs 19 tons. It is not surprising that every visitor to the St. Petersburg museum who sees this miracle of miracles is surprised not only by the beauty of a huge vase made of magnificent jasper, but also by its unreal dimensions, which is why people even burst into exclamations, like: what were the masters before stone!
Indeed, the Big Kolyvan vase, according to written evidence, was made in the period from 1829 to 1849. Who were the masters of stone cutting at that time who managed to create such a unique and at the same time amazing masterpiece? This has long been of interest not only to ordinary people or connoisseurs of art, but also scientists.
Interesting because to create such a vase requires something much more than just talent. As modern stone cutters say, it is simply unrealistic to make such a product from a single piece of jasper (coil) - it is too fragile for this. Moreover, the more beautiful the stone is in its pattern, the more fragile. And the piece of jasper from which the Queen of Vases is made is simply striking in its heterogeneity (patterning). Even in the manufacture of a small product from such a coil, 70 percent would go to waste, and when processing such a lump of jasper (you can only imagine it), it would certainly split, especially during the application of elliptical edges that decorate the Big Kolyvan vase.
The researchers went further: they decided to create a smaller copy of the Queen of Vases, using all modern technologies and capabilities of a stone cutter. For this purpose, a special sketch was created, copying in detail and accurately a unique museum exhibit, according to which it was proposed to the most authoritative stone cutters of Russia to make a vase from a single piece of jasper only one meter high and half a meter in diameter.
And none of the craftsmen took up this work, because, in their opinion, it is simply impossible to fulfill such an order: the coil blank will be spoiled even at the stage of rough processing. This is even with modern technologies and unique devices for cutting stone.
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The question arises: how did the masters of the first half of the 19th century manage to make the Big Kolyvan Vase using the most "simple" tools? There remains only one rational explanation: the stone cutters of that time possessed some kind of secret technologies that were lost over time. And we still do not know how such unique masterpieces were made, and therefore we conjecture anything, making the most fantastic assumptions, being surprised and perplexed. And what remains to be done when no one has attached a detailed description of how she was made to this Queen of vases?..
Daniil Myslinsky