"There is a reason for excitement": in the Historical Museum can not find the icon of Our Lady

Representatives of the State Historical Museum (GIM) commented on media reports about the disappearance of the 16th-century icon of Our Lady of Smolensk-Shuiskaya from the foundations of the institution. The press service of the State Historical Museum confirmed that it is currently unknown where the icon is located. At the same time, the museum staff stressed that it would be possible to officially declare the loss only after a complete reconciliation of the fund of Old Russian painting, numbering about 30 thousand items.

In 2018, the icon was exhibited at the Murmansk Art Museum, in August it was returned to the GIM storage facility. In early December, the museum staff began to prepare the exhibition "Russian North", but could not find the "Mother of God of Smolensk-Shuisk" among the exhibits issued by the keeper. After that, according to the press service, an official investigation was initiated, during which they checked the entire collection of the custodian, but the icon was never found. Administration of the State Historical Museum informing about the situation the Ministry of Culture (it is the founder of the museum) and law enforcement officers.

As noted in the press release, “for more than a year, the funds of the Old Russian Painting Department of the Historical Museum are stored in a temporary storage during the restoration period in the premises of the permanent storage facility”. This circumstance causes difficulties when accounting and processing funds.

The deputy director of the museum for stock work, Marina Chistyakova, expressed confidence that according to the results of the total check, the loss would be revealed, and also excluded the version with theft. “There is a reason for excitement, let's say so, but there is no talk of any theft, and I hope it will not do,” TASS quotes.

Missing Original List

“The Virgin of Smolensk-Shuiskaya” was written in Vologda in the second half of the 16th century. It is among the lists of the Shuya Icon of the Mother of God, created in 1654 by Gerasim Ikonnikov. According to the "Moskovsky Komsomol", the cost of the icon is estimated at about 4 million rubles, however, the newspaper writes, it was not insured.

The original was considered miraculous - with it, in particular, they linked the cessation of the plague epidemic ("pestilence"), which raged in Shuya at that time, and later - the deliverance of the city from two cholera epidemics. After the miracles created by the icon, it began to create numerous lists, which are now kept in various churches and museums throughout the country, including the Museum of the Russian Icon and the Tretyakov Gallery. Some listings are in private collections.

The original icon has been considered lost for more than 80 years. From the time of writing, she remained in the Resurrection Cathedral in Shuya, where she survived several fires and the campaign of the Soviet authorities to seize church property.

According to some reports, in 1935, with the approval of the leadership of the Tretyakov Gallery, it was protected by an inspector for museums in the Ivanovo Industrial Region. Nothing has been known about the work of Ikonnikov since 1937, when the cathedral was closed. Any information about its future movement is missing.

Random finds

In the funds and storerooms of Russian museums, works of art are often found that, for one reason or another, were considered lost and missing. Often this is due to the imperfection of the accounting system of exhibits and banal errors. Storage units are at particular risk when moving funds.

In the summer of 2018, a monumental carved iconostasis of a 17th-century Vysoko-Petrovsky monastery, commissioned by Tsar Peter I., was discovered in the vaults of the museum-reserve Kolomenskoye. It was previously thought that it was destroyed when the Soviet authorities closed the monastery in 1918.

One of the most notorious finds of recent years was the painting by Peter Paul Rubens “The Penitent Mary Magdalene with Sister Marfa” - since 1975, she has been gathering dust in the Irbit Museum of Fine Arts’s repository, because the management of the institution in a small town in the Sverdlovsk region had not had a long time for restoration canvases. In Irbit, the work was sent by the Hermitage staff, who were confident that they were giving a copy of the masterpiece to the museum.

However, after the restoration, it turned out that the picture belongs to the hand of Rubens himself. This, in turn, questioned the authenticity of the canvases hanging in the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna.

In the Hermitage itself, an ancient Roman sculpture “Victoria Calvatone” from the Antique Collection of the State Museums of Berlin was recently found. It was lost during the Second World War. In 2016, it turned out that all this time the sculpture stood in the vault of one of the main museums of Russia under the wrong marking: in 1946 it was recorded as “French sculpture of the XVII century”.

Such cases happen from time to time around the world. For example, in 2012, Pablo Picasso's "Sitting Woman in a Red Hat" found work in the vault of the Evansville Museum of Fine Arts, History and Science in Indiana in the state of Indiana. In 1963, designer Raymond Lowe handed her to the museum, but because of the confusion in the documents, the picture was placed in the vaults as a work of an unknown imitator of the legendary master.

A year later, the State Museum of Art of Uzbekistan reported on the discovery of the Picasso ceramics collection - they stumbled upon it in search of Russian porcelain items for the exhibition. A set of 12 objects almost 40 years before the Soviet museum was given by the widow of a friend of the artist, who shared socialist convictions. Earlier in the same institution found the author's copy of the canvas Paolo Veronese "Lamentation of Christ."