The conversion to Christianity in the tenth century of the Slavs inhabiting the lands of present-day Russia and Ukraine had a momentous effect on art and architecture. Converted by Greek missionaries, the grand prince in Kyiv, then the center of the East Slavic federation, received and inculcated Christian culture in its Byzantine forms. Churches were built, and icons and frescoes for ritual and decoration became an immediate need. The forms and technical know-how came from Constantinople. Local styles evolved around the principal cities such as Novgorod, Pskov, Vladimir, Suzdal, and Moscow. These styles in turn ramified in remote areas such as the Ural Mountains and the White Sea and Lake Onega regions of the north. Bronze Horseman carries historical surveys and overviews on the origins of art in Rus’, on icons and frescoes of the tenth to the seventeenth century, on the first schools of secularized religious art in the eighteenth century, the so-called late icon (pozdniaia ikona).