We cannot even imagine how many world masterpieces perished in fires, floods, wars, simply by thoughtlessness. At best, it has settled in private collections. Let's take a look at a small part
"Leda" dissolved in the royal chambers
Around 1530, Michelangelo painted the painting “Leda and the Swan” on an iconographic plot: the wife of the Spartan king Tyndareus is seduced by Zeus who turned into a swan.
A friend and student of the artist Antonio Mini took her to France. Soon "Leda" ended up in the royal palace of Fontainebleau, where her trace disappeared forever. We can judge her only by a pale copy of the Red Florentine - the artist Rosso Fiorentino, who served at the court of Francis the First.
Something similar happened with “Leda and the Swan” by Leonardo da Vinci: only a picturesque copy made by his student Cesare da Sesto remained from the picture.
Too scary devilish wind
Russian battle painter Vasily Vereshchagin (1842–1904) is a special article for researchers. It is believed that many of his paintings have disappeared - such were the conditions in which they were created from nature.
But where the chilling picture “The suppression of the Indian uprising by the British” disappeared is unknown.
In 1874-1876 and in 1882 Vereshchagin made two trips to India. He planned to create a series of paintings on the history of the brutal conquest and oppression of India by the British. On the canvas - the execution of peasants who rebelled against the colonialists. The method of execution was called "devil's wind". From the memoirs of Vereshchagin: “The guns, how many of them happen in number, line up in a row, slowly bring to each muzzle and tie one more or less criminal Indian citizen by the elbows different ages, professions and castes, and then on command all the guns fire at once. The execution was all the more terrible for the Hindus because, according to their beliefs, the soul and body, literally torn to shreds, could no longer be reborn.
Among the condemned are old peasants, who embody irresistible spiritual strength. In terms of content, this is one of the most powerful paintings in the history of world painting.
In 1887 the painting was exhibited in London and caused a storm of protest; the artist, whom it is pointless to suspect of distorting reality, was threatened with a lawsuit. However, ordinary Londoners understood that everything was so. And the picture just disappeared from the exhibition when unclear circumstances. Only numerous copies remain of it.
In which fire did Kandinsky burn?
Perhaps the most great damage The (largely intentional) art was inflicted by the 20th century, its wars and dictatorships.
By 1937, German Propaganda Minister Goebbels confiscated from 32 museums and ordered that 650 examples of "degenerate" ("Jewish-Bolshevik") art be exhibited at once. This was the name now given to modernist works that did not meet Hitler's tastes and "represented a danger to Aryan nation". The remarkable vernissage included paintings by Marc Chagall, Oskar Kokoschka, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, El Lissitzky, Emil Nolde, Max Ernst. In total, 16,558 works of art were confiscated! Some of them were sold at auctions in Switzerland, but more than a thousand were burned, and most scattered around the Berlin cellars, where they were found in 1945.
In 1942 in the garden National Gallery Jeu-de-Paume (Paris) were burned paintings by Picasso, Dali, Miro, Léger, Klee, Ernst. Among the masterpieces destroyed by the Nazis are three works from Wassily Kandinsky's "Compositions" series. We know one from a sketch, the other from a photograph.
Sketch for "Composition No. 2". Artist Wassily Kandinsky. 1910 The painting itself was burned by the Nazis in Paris in 1942.
In 1945, the retreating Nazis set fire to the Schloss Immendorf museum, where a private Viennese collection of 14 paintings by the world's most expensive artist, the Austrian symbolist Gustav Klimt, was deposited. Did they die forever in the flames? Or were saved and now decorate someone's luxurious salons? Maybe someday we'll find out.
During the Allied bombardment of Dresden in 1945, a shell destroyed a car carrying over a hundred paintings from Dresden Gallery to the Königstein fortress, where they were supposed to be hidden. One of them is "The Stone Crushers" by Gustave Courbet, a picture that shook paris salon 1850.
Stone crushers. Artist Gustav Courbet. 1849 The painting was destroyed during the bombing of Dresden in 1945.
During the fire of the Second World War, Van Gogh's painting "The Artist on the Way to Tarascon" (1888) burned down (or, again, on the sly was stolen from the Magdeburg Museum). It is all the more valuable because it is a self-portrait, where Van Gogh depicted himself weaving along the road with all the usual accessories for an artist.
In 1945, in Berlin, during a fire in bunkers in the Friedrichshain district, where paintings from Berlin museums were collected, Caravaggio's Portrait of a Courtesan burned down. The fire then forever destroyed at least 400 more works by Rubens, Goya, Cranach, Jordaens, van Dyck.
Pigs for seed
Caravaggio, the greatest reformer painting XVII century, in fact, the founder of realism, generally suffered more than once.
In 1969, in Palermo, his painting "Nativity with Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence" was taken out of the chapel of San Lorenzo.
The stolen canvas was handed over to the Pullara mafia family, who kept it in completely unsuitable conditions. "Christmas" was gnawed at by pigs and rats for a long time. In the end, the "owners" decided to just burn it. The version is reliable (one recruited mafia told about the fate of the picture), but it is so tragic that it is very difficult to come to terms with it: painting by Caravaggio still ranks first in the list of stolen Italian masterpieces and in third place in the world ranking.
Virgin with a knife
Lost icons in history are countless. One of the latest high-profile cases is the theft of the Andronikov Icon Mother of God from Vyshny Volochyok in 1984. The icon was Greek list beginning of the XIV century, was a home shrine Byzantine emperor Andronicus III Palaiologos (in honor of him and the name) and was considered miraculous. Andronicus donated it to the Greek monastery of Monemvasia. In the 19th century, the abbot fled from the Turks with the icon to the city of Patras. He bequeathed it to his relative, the Russian Consul General N.I. Vlassopoulo, and even the son of that in 1839 sent her from Athens to St. Petersburg to Emperor Nikolai Pavlovich. The Andronikov icon in a complicated way migrated to Winter Palace, then to the Trinity Cathedral. In 1877 she was transferred to the Convent of Our Lady of Kazan near Vyshny Volochok.
After the irretrievable loss of this ancient shrine, only its copy (miraculous) has been preserved. On the neck of the Virgin there is an image of a bleeding wound inflicted by a Turk. At the bottom of the original icon was a case with a Damascus steel knife - a striking weapon. But for the robbers, the small size of the icon, 25×35 cm, most likely played a decisive role.
Where is the only seascape Rembrandt?
In 1990, a private company was robbed in Boston. art Gallery famous philanthropist Isabella Stewart Gardner, who collected 2,500 items European art. Thirteen of them were carried out on the fateful night by two thieves dressed as policemen. And this is the biggest museum robbery in US history.
Two masterpieces deserve special lamentation. The first is Vermeer's "Concert", which, worth two hundred million dollars, makes it one of the most valuable stolen works of art in the world.
Painting Dutch artist Jan Vermeer's "Concert" (1665-1666), was stolen in 1990 from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston
The second is the only seascape by the great portrait painter Rembrandt “Christ in a storm on the Sea of Galilee”. In 2013, the FBI announced that the crime had been solved and the robbers had been identified. But what about this humanity? The canvases have sailed away forever.
Rembrandt's painting "Christ during a storm on the Sea of Galilee"
A very expensive bastard
On September 2, 1998, a plane flying from New York to Geneva crashed into the Atlantic Ocean while attempting an emergency landing at a Canadian airport. More than two hundred passengers died. It turned out that the on-board system responsible for entertainment (cinema, video games) failed, and a short circuit caused a fire. The painting by Picasso "The Artist" (1963, one and a half million dollars) was also lost. Did the plane crash by chance, on board of which, in addition, jewels worth a billion dollars "flyed"?
Artist. Painting by Pablo Picasso. 1963 Died in a plane crash in 1998.
A 20-centimeter part of the painting was found in the water, while the jewels disappeared forever.
Small house fire for 200 million euros
And this story was passed from mouth to mouth two years ago. On October 16, 2012, at three in the morning, seven masterpieces were taken out of the Rotterdam Kunsthal Museum in just two minutes: Pablo Picasso's "Harlequin Head", Henri Matisse's "Reading Girl", "Waterloo Bridge" and "Charing Cross Bridge" by Claude Monet, " Girl in front of an open window" by Paul Gauguin, "Self-portrait" by Meyer de Haan and "Woman with eyes closed» Lucian Freud ( total cost up to 200 million euros).
The trail led the Dutch police to Romania, where in 2013 they began to detain the participants in the robbery of the century.
Olga Dogaru, the old mother of one of the kidnappers, after her son's arrest in January, buried material evidence - stolen paintings - in the village cemetery. In February, she decided to deal with material evidence much more radically - she burned them in an oven.
The ash contained traces of paint and primer (lead, zinc, copper blue), canvas, and century-old nails. The world was shocked. Ignorance has never served art. But to get to this...
Fluffy Jesus
However, there are also anecdotal stories. So, recently, another old woman, Spaniard Cecilia Jimenez, an 80-year-old parishioner of the Church of Mercy in the city of Borja in Zaragoza, with the permission of the rector, restored a fresco from the beginning of the 20th century " Ecce Homo” (“Behold the Man”) by the artist Elias Garcia Martinez.
She did it so unprofessionally and ugly that the half-meter face of Jesus is now called "Ecce Mono" ("Behold the monkey") or "Fluffy Jesus." Thanks to the Internet, the event received such publicity in the world in just a couple of days that tourists are now specially wrapped in Borhu to gawk at the attraction. The fresco has been fenced off, and the church charges a fee to view it.
And if at first everyone was indignant and demanded that the painting be returned to its former appearance, today the residents of Borja, proud of the world's attention, admitted that Cecilia's work is much more interesting than the original original. She is declared a primitive artist and is seriously compared with Munch and Modigliani.
But here's what's interesting - Cecilia Jimenez now demands that the church share with her the income from tourist visits, that is, deduct "author's" for this strange performance. Quite in the spirit of our times.
De Francesco de Neri de Miniato del Sera and Lodovico di Leonardo di Buonarroti Simoni (1475 - 1564) - Italian sculptor, painter, architect, poet, thinker. One of the greatest masters the era of the Renaissance. When Michelangelo painted the ceilings of the Sistine Chapel, he lay on his back and poisonous paint dripped into his eyes, so by the end of the work he was practically blind.
Wonderful novel written about Michelangelo Irving Stone. And the novel is called Torments and joys". The very title of the novel speaks of difficult fate genius on the path of the art of sculpture. The authenticity of the narrative requires a trip to the painter's homeland.
After selling his house in California, Irving Stone moved to Italy. In order to more accurately convey to the reader the secrets of working with stone, the writer takes a hammer and a chisel in his hands and masters the skill of a stonemason. With the help of fellow scientists, the writer penetrates the archives and finds there many records relating to Michelangelo and his family.
This book makes a strong impression, and after reading it, you want to study the work of Michelangelo. Great sculptor and the painter is described in it from his childhood to his very maturity, the path from the boy to the master is shown, the character, his sorrows, his joys, hopes and disappointments are very vividly described.
Ultimate tension of spiritual and physical strength people, courage in the struggle, passion in thinking about the fate of man - this is the main content of Michelangelo's art. “A person has not yet been born who, like me, would be so inclined to love people,” the great Italian sculptor, painter, architect and poet Michelangelo wrote about himself. He created brilliant works.
Pieta. 1498-1499. Marble. Height: 174 cm. Diameter: 69 cm. St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican, Rome.
Michelangelo Buonarroti, who thought a lot, like everyone else the best people Renaissance, about a free and harmonious life, understood that the right to this freedom and comprehensive development man must stand up in the struggle.
They talk about alien evil, about pure,
About the perfect world these eyes, -
I see the heavenly forces in them as the center,
For a man embraced with pride!
The art of the Renaissance rose to its heights on poetic wings. In the pathos of knowing the nature of things there was a force of delight, an intoxicating joy of discovery. The Proto-Renaissance in Italy lasted for about a century and a half, Early Renaissance –
about a century, the High Renaissance - only about thirty years. Its end is associated with 1530, a tragic milestone, when the Italian states lost their freedom. Only three names are enough to understand the meaning of Italian culture high renaissance: Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, .
They were not alike in everything, although their destinies had much in common: all three formed in the bosom of the Florentine school, and then worked at the courts of patrons, mainly popes, enduring both mercy and the whims of high-ranking customers. Their paths often crossed, they acted as rivals, treated each other with hostility, almost hostility. They had too different artistic and human identities. But in the minds of the descendants, these three peaks form a single mountain range, embodying the main values Italian Renaissance- Intelligence, Harmony, Power.
Atlant. OK. 1530. Marble. Height: 277 cm. Academy of Fine Arts, Florence.
Michelangelo Buonarotti. His long life- the life of Hercules, a string of feats that he performed, grieving and suffering, as if not by his own will, but forced by his genius. Romain Rolland says: "Let the one who denies genius, who does not know what it is, remember Michelangelo. Here is a man truly possessed by a genius. A genius, alien to his nature, who invaded him like a conqueror, and kept him in bondage."
Madonna and Child (Medici Madonna). OK. 1521-1534. Marble. Height: 226 cm. New sacristy Churches of San Lorenzo, Florence.
“As all the old sources testify, Michelangelo did not receive any special architectural education. It is unlikely that in the workshop of Ghirlandaio, where Michelangelo stayed only a year, architecture could take any prominent place in his system of education. But he, like all Florentines, he had one great advantage: he always had before his eyes samples of first-class architecture, which accustomed a person to youthful years understand and appreciate the beauty of proportions and a very special structure of the architectural language”.
V. Lazarev:Michelangelo was a sculptor, architect, painter and poet. But most of all and in everything - the sculptor: his figures, written on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, can be mistaken for statues, in his poems, it seems, one can feel the chisel of the sculptor.
Having conceived the work, Michelangelo could spend years in quarries, selecting marble and building roads for transportation; he wanted to be everything at once - an engineer, a laborer, a stonemason; I wanted to do everything myself - to build palaces, churches - alone, with my own hands. He worked like a convict.”
R. Rollan:
At the age of 26, the artist takes on an incredibly difficult work - a statue of David.
David. 1501-1504. Marble. Height: 410 cm. Academy of Fine Arts, Florence.
The statue of David is one of early works Michelangelo, about five meters high, placed on Signoria Square, near the Palazzo Vecchio, where the government center of Florence was located. The installation of this statue was of particular political importance: at this time, at the very beginning of the 16th century, the Florentine Republic, having expelled its internal tyrants, was determined to resist the enemies that threatened it from within and without.
They wanted to believe that little Florence could win, just as the once young peaceful shepherd David defeated the giant Goliath. Here was where the heroic warehouse of talent of Michelangelo manifested itself. He carved from a single block of marble a beautiful young giant in his restrained anger. The sculptor worked on the statue for three years. In 1504, the statue was placed in Florence Square, directly under open sky for everyone to see.
The statues of Michelangelo keep their stone nature. They are always distinguished by their solidity of volume: Michelangelo said that the sculpture that can be rolled down the mountain and not a single part of it will break off is good. The statues of Michelangelo are titans, who were endowed with their properties by a hard mountain stone. Their movements are strong, passionate, and at the same time, as if constrained; Michelangelo's favorite motif of contraposta - the upper part of the torso is sharply turned.
Not at all like the light, undulating movement that animates the bodies of Greek statues.
Two main sculptural designs run through almost the entire creative biography Michelangelo: Tomb of Popes Julius II and Medici Tomb. Julius II, vain and glorious, himself ordered Michelangelo his tomb, wishing that it would surpass all the mausoleums of the world with its splendor. The obstinate independence of the artist led to constant clashes and conflicts with the customer. In addition, Julius II soon lost interest in the project, he was told that it was a bad omen to prepare a tomb for himself during his lifetime. Instead, in 1508. He commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, which he did for four years, at the same time that Raphael painted the Vatican stanzas.
The dimensions of the future painting exceeded 600 sq.m. In incredibly difficult conditions, lying on his back, the artist himself, without assistants, depicted on the ceiling of the chapel a biblical legend from the creation of the world to the flood. Best Look this mural - the first man Adam. Courageous and beautiful, with an unawakened thought and undiscovered powers, he lies on a hillside, his hands outstretched to the god who created him. An angel looks over the shoulder of God, amazed by the beauty of man.
Tomb of Pope Julius II marble
Michelangelo Buonarroti Michelangelo Buonarroti
Moses, Moses 1513-1516
Michelangelo spent four years high on the scaffolding, overcoming muscle pain, endlessly wiping off the paint that flooded his face. After that, his eyes almost stopped seeing: in order to read a book or examine some thing, he had to raise it high above his head. Gradually this disease passed. After the death of Julius II, in 1513, Michelangelo again set to work on his tomb, changing the original project, but with a new one.
He could not create with concentration: he was ordered, forced, threatened, torn away from what he managed to get carried away with. And, finally, the most sad thing, which left the mark of boundless sorrow on the heroic art of Michelangelo: - the siege and fall of Florence, the destruction of the republic, the era of terror and the Inquisition, the years of suffering loneliness spent in exile in Rome.
The Pope agreed to pardon the artist if he completed a chapel glorifying the Medici. Michelangelo set to work again and in 1534 completed the chapel with the tomb in it. Four naked figures on the sarcophagi: "Evening", "Night", "Morning" and "Day" - as if symbolized the fast flowing time. The words that Michelangelo put into the mouth of his "Night" reveal the attitude of the great master to reality:
Such were the thoughts of the defeated Florentines. After graduating from the chapel, Michelangelo left Florence forever, but thoughts about his homeland did not leave him. And when the tyrant of Florence Alessandro Medici was killed in 1537, the artist conceived and later created a bust of Brutus, the tyrant-fighter who killed the Roman emperor Caesar.
“He who kills a tyrant does not kill a man, but a beast in the form of a man,” said Michelangelo. But Florence still groans under the rule of the Medici, and Michelangelo lives in Rome. In 1534 - 1541 in the same Sistine Chapel, where he painted the ceiling, the artist creates a fresco "The Last Judgment".
The colossal picture, according to the clergy, was supposed to show the weakness of man, his obedience to the divine will. But Michelangelo brought into this fresco the spirit of rebelliousness, the spirit of struggle. In 1945, he finally finishes the tomb of Pope Julius II, for which he received an order 40 years ago. The best statues for this tomb were made as early as 1513-1516: this is the figure of Moses, according to biblical legend formidable and wise leader of the Jewish people - and a statue of two bound captive youths. One of them, having collected all his heroic forces from the fetters, and the other, defeated, dies.
Rachel. Fragment of the tomb of Julius II. OK. 1542. Marble. Height: 209 cm. Church of San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome.
Slowly bypassing, in front and from the sides, the figure of the “Bound Prisoner”, following the changing plastic aspects, the viewer sees all the stages of a heroic and vain effort to break the bonds. he plunges into a state that is equally similar to death and sleep - a beneficent liberation from torment. Michelangelo did not give of great importance the exact meaning of the allegories.
For him, the plasticity of the human body, its movements and counterpoints were in themselves full of inner content, broad and capacious.
Also, the sculptures of the Medici Chapel, completed already in the 30s, do not lend themselves to an unambiguous interpretation. These are "Night" and "Day", "Morning" and "Evening" - they are reclining in pairs on sarcophagi under the portrait statues of Giuliano and Lorenzo Medici located in niches. The lids of the sarcophagi are sloping, and the position of the figures seems precarious, it seems that even in their slumber they feel the unreliability of their bed, unconsciously looking for support for their legs (and their legs slide), trying to strain the muscles relaxed by sleep. These powerful bodies are overcome by a painful languor, they seem to be poisoned.
Slow, reluctant awakening, anxious, joyless wakefulness, falling asleep, numbing limbs, and sleep - heavy, but still bringing oblivion. "Night" in the image of a woman who sleeps, leaning her elbow on her bent leg and supporting her head low with her hand, is the most plastically expressive and beautiful of the four statues. Poems were dedicated to her. And Michelangelo, in response to someone's rather banal madrigal, that this animated stone is ready to wake up, answered with a quatrain that has become no less famous than the statue itself:
It is gratifying to sleep, it is more gratifying to be a stone,
Oh, in this age, criminal and shameful,
Not to live, not to feel is an enviable lot.
Please be quiet, don't you dare wake me up.
Apostle Paul. OK. 1503/1504. Marble. Height: 127 cm. Cathedral, Siena.
Michelangelo did not carve a grandiose statue out of a whole mountain, as he dreamed. But he built the world's greatest Cathedral of St. Peter in Rome. On January 1, 1547, he was appointed chief architect of this cathedral. Michelangelo even perceived architecture as a reflection of human beauty. "It is absolutely certain that architectural parts are similar to parts of the human body," he said. "Whoever has never been able or is not able to reproduce the human figure well, especially with regard to anatomy, will never understand this .
Michelangelo is an artist last breath idolized human beauty. And it seemed to him something terrible, fatal in her - the highest limit on the border of non-existence.
"Michelangelo was the first sculptor who saw in human body, in its movement, the inconsistency of aspirations, features of its internal discord, features that, perhaps, are best expressed in sculpture, provided that the viewer, surveying the statue from all sides, is involved in comprehending human experiences. In this regard, Michelangelo goes beyond the Renaissance, which in the person of Leonardo and Raphael saw the highest task of art in the embodiment of calm, ideal beauty. This, undoubtedly, affected the advanced nature of Michelangelo's sculpture. In this he anticipates later centuries.”
"The Virgin at the Stairs" and "The Battle of the Centaurs", which he carved for Bertoldo and the Magnificent - the Platonic circle then laughed at him, because his work seemed "purely Greek" to scientists; "Saint Proclus" and "Saint Petronius", sculpted in Bologna for Aldovrandi; a wooden crucifix for abbot Bichiellini; "Sleeping Cupid", with which he wanted to fool a merchant in Rome; "Bacchus", which he sculpted in the garden of Jacopo Galli; "Lamentation", commissioned by Cardinal Saint Denis - for the church of St. Peter; the giant "David", created for the gonfalonier Soderini in Florence; " Holy Family", which Agnolo Doni begged from him; cardboard for the painting of the Battle of Kashin, nicknamed "Bathers", - it was written out of a sense of rivalry with Leonardo da Vinci;
"The Virgin and Child", sculpted by order of merchants from Bruges in his first own workshop; the ill-fated bronze statue - a portrait of Pope Julius II; "The Book of Genesis", written for Julius II on the ceiling of Sistina; fresco" Doomsday", executed at the request of Pope Paul III in order to complete the decoration of the chapel; "Moses" for the tomb of Julius; four unfinished "Giants" remaining in Florence, "Morning" and "Evening", "Night" and "Day" in the chapel Medici; "Conversion of Paul" and "Crucifixion of Peter" in the chapel of Paulina; Capitol, Pieva gate, three statues of "Lamentations", carved for their own pleasure ... and the string of images suddenly stopped and froze: in his mind's eye Michelangelo now saw only St. Peter's Cathedral .
Tomb of Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino (Medici Chapel). OK. 1525. Marble. New Sacristy of the Church of San Lorenzo, Florence.
St. Peter's Cathedral ... He entered this temple through its main portal, stepped onto a bright, thick Roman sunlight, shining in the wide nave of the cathedral, stopped under the very middle of the dome, at the tomb of St. Peter. He felt his soul leaving his body, soaring higher and higher, to the very dome, merging with it - merging with space, with time, with the sky, with God.
"VICTORY"
Michelangelo left the house in Piazza San Lorenzo with everything done there
drawings and clay models, sat down in the workshop on Via Mozza and devoted himself to work on the barely begun block "Victory", which was part of his original intention tombs of Julius. "Victory" arose in him in the form of a beautiful, slender, ancient greek, a young man, although not as muscular as his former marble statues. Michelangelo's hands
they worked energetically, his chisels biting into the pliable stone, but he soon felt that in his thoughts he did not have the harmony and composure that are required for work.
Here he carves "Victory". Win over whom? Above what? If he doesn't know who the Conqueror is, how can he tell who the Loser is? Under the feet of the Victor, he sculpted the face and head of the Defeated - an old man crushed by misfortune ... himself? This is how he will probably look in ten or twenty years - with a long gray beard. What crushed him? Years?
Is it possible that the Winner is Youth, because only in youth is a person able to imagine that one can become a Winner? In all the features of the Defeated one felt life experience, and wisdom, and suffering - and yet he was trampled, being at the feet of a young man.
M. Alpatov.
He endured a lot of suffering, torment and deprivation great artist for his long and difficult life. Already an old man, Michelangelo wrote:
"Alas! Alas! I am betrayed by the imperceptibly rushing days. I have waited too long. Time has flown by, and here I am an old man. Too late to repent, too late to think - death is on the threshold.
with wasted time. Alas! Alas! I look back and can't find a day that belongs to me!
Deceptive hopes and vainglorious desires prevented me from seeing the truth, now I understand it. How many tears, torments, how many sighs of love were there, for not a single human passion remained alien to me. Alas! Alas! I wander, not knowing where, and I'm scared. And if I am not mistaken - oh, God forbid that I am mistaken - I see, I clearly see, Creator, that I am destined for eternal punishment, awaiting those who committed evil, knowing what is good. And now I don't know what to hope for."
What did he accomplish? Small in comparison with their plans, but colossally a lot on the scales of art history.
And now, on the square near the church of San Miniato in Florence, there is a bronze copy of David as a monument to the artist, who, with his art, affirmed the freedom and beauty of man and defended them with weapons in his hands.
Only I alone, burning, lie in the darkness,
When the rays from the world the sun hides;
There is rest for everyone, I'm languishing - and crying
My soul is stretched out on the earth.
Angel with a candlestick
crucifixion. OK. 1492-1493. colored tree. Size: 135 x 135 cm. Buonarroti Museum, Florence.
World masterpieces, the trace of which disappeared foreverWe cannot even imagine how many world masterpieces perished in fires, floods, wars, simply by thoughtlessness. At best, it has settled in private collections. Let's take a look at a small part...
"Leda" dissolved in the royal chambers
Around 1530, Michelangelo painted the painting “Leda and the Swan” on an iconographic plot: the wife of the Spartan king Tyndareus is seduced by Zeus who turned into a swan.
Leda and the swan. Artist Michelangelo. OK. 1530 copy of Rosso Fiorentino
A friend and student of the artist Antonio Mini took her to France. Soon "Leda" ended up in the royal palace of Fontainebleau, where her trace disappeared forever. We can judge her only by a pale copy of the Red Florentine - the artist Rosso Fiorentino, who served at the court of Francis the First.
Something similar happened with “Leda and the Swan” by Leonardo da Vinci: only a picturesque copy made by his student Cesare da Sesto remained from the picture.
Too scary devilish wind
Russian battle painter Vasily Vereshchagin (1842-1904) - a special article for researchers. It is believed that many of his paintings have disappeared - such were the conditions in which they were created from nature.
But where the chilling picture “The suppression of the Indian uprising by the British” disappeared is unknown.
In 1874-1876 and in 1882 Vereshchagin made two trips to India. He planned to create a series of paintings on the history of the brutal conquest and oppression of India by the British. On the canvas - the execution of peasants who rebelled against the colonialists. The method of execution was called "devil's wind".
V. Vereshchagin "The suppression of the Indian uprising by the British."
From the memoirs of Vereshchagin: “The guns, how many of them happen in number, line up in a row, slowly bring to each muzzle and tie one more or less criminal Indian citizen of different ages, professions and castes by the elbows, and then, on command, all the guns fire at once” . The execution was all the more terrible for the Hindus because, according to their beliefs, the soul and body, literally torn to shreds, could no longer be reborn.
Among the condemned are old peasants, who embody irresistible spiritual strength. In terms of content, this is one of the most powerful paintings in the history of world painting.
In 1887 the painting was exhibited in London and caused a storm of protest; the artist, whom it is pointless to suspect of distorting reality, was threatened with a lawsuit. However, ordinary Londoners understood that everything was so. And the picture simply disappeared from the exhibition under unclear circumstances. Only numerous copies remain of it.
In which fire did Kandinsky burn?
Perhaps the greatest damage (largely intentional) to art was caused by the 20th century, its wars and dictatorships.
By 1937, German Propaganda Minister Goebbels confiscated from 32 museums and ordered that 650 examples of "degenerate" ("Jewish-Bolshevik") art be exhibited at once. This was the name now given to modernist works that did not meet the tastes of Hitler and "representing a danger to the Aryan nation."
Sketch for "Composition No. 2". Artist Wassily Kandinsky. 1910 The painting itself was burned by the Nazis in Paris in 1942.
The remarkable vernissage included paintings by Marc Chagall, Oskar Kokoschka, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, El Lissitzky, Emil Nolde, Max Ernst. In total, 16,558 works of art were confiscated! Some of them were sold at auctions in Switzerland, but more than a thousand were burned, and most were scattered around the Berlin cellars, where they were found in 1945.
In 1942, paintings by Picasso, Dali, Miró, Léger, Klee, Ernst were burned in the garden of the National Gallery of Jeu-de-Paume (Paris). Among the masterpieces destroyed by the Nazis are three works from Wassily Kandinsky's "Compositions" series. We know one from a sketch, the other from a photograph.
In 1945, the retreating Nazis set fire to the Schloss Immendorf museum, where a private Viennese collection of 14 paintings by the world's most expensive artist, the Austrian symbolist Gustav Klimt, was deposited. Did they die forever in the flames? Or were saved and now decorate someone's luxurious salons? Maybe someday we'll find out.
During the Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945, a shell destroyed a car carrying over a hundred paintings from the Dresden Gallery to the Königstein Fortress, where they were supposed to be hidden. One of them is Gustave Courbet's The Stone Crushers, a painting that rocked the Paris Salon of 1850.
"Stone Breakers" Artist Gustav Courbet. 1849 The painting was destroyed during the bombing of Dresden in 1945.
During the fire of the Second World War, Van Gogh's painting "The Artist on the Way to Tarascon" (1888) burned down (or, again, on the sly was stolen from the Magdeburg Museum). It is all the more valuable because it is a self-portrait, where Van Gogh depicted himself weaving along the road with all the usual accessories for an artist.
In 1945, in Berlin, during a fire in bunkers in the Friedrichshain district, where paintings from Berlin museums were collected, Caravaggio's Portrait of a Courtesan burned down. The fire then forever destroyed at least 400 more works by Rubens, Goya, Cranach, Jordaens, van Dyck.
Pigs for seed
Caravaggio, the greatest reformer of painting of the 17th century, in fact, the founder of realism, generally suffered more than once.
In 1969, in Palermo, his painting "Nativity with Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence" was taken out of the chapel of San Lorenzo.
Michelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio. "Christmas with Saint Lawrence and Saint Francis"
The stolen canvas was handed over to the Pullara mafia family, who kept it in completely unsuitable conditions. "Christmas" was gnawed at by pigs and rats for a long time. In the end, the "owners" decided to just burn it. The version is reliable (one recruited mafia told about the fate of the painting), but it is so tragic that it is very difficult to come to terms with it: Caravaggio's painting is still in first place in the list of stolen Italian masterpieces and in third place in the world ranking.
Virgin with a knife
Lost icons in history are countless. One of the latest high-profile cases was the theft of the Andronikovskaya Icon of the Mother of God from Vyshny Volochyok in 1984. The icon was a Greek copy of the beginning of the 14th century, was the home shrine of the Byzantine emperor Andronicus III Palaiologos (the name is in honor of him) and was considered miraculous. Andronicus donated it to the Greek monastery of Monemvasia.
In the 19th century, the abbot fled from the Turks with the icon to the city of Patras. He bequeathed it to his relative, the Russian Consul General N.I. Vlassopoulo, and even the son of that in 1839 sent her from Athens to St. Petersburg to Emperor Nikolai Pavlovich. The Andronikov icon migrated in a complicated way to the Winter Palace, then to the Trinity Cathedral. In 1877 she was transferred to the Convent of Our Lady of Kazan near Vyshny Volochok.
After the irretrievable loss of this ancient shrine, only its copy (miraculous) has been preserved. On the neck of the Virgin there is an image of a bleeding wound inflicted by a Turk. At the bottom of the original icon was a case with a Damascus steel knife - a striking weapon. But for the robbers, the small size of the icon, 25 × 35 cm, most likely played a decisive role.
Where is Rembrandt's only seascape?
In 1990, the private art gallery of the famous philanthropist Isabella Stewart Gardner was robbed in Boston, who collected 2,500 pieces of European art. Thirteen of them were carried out on the fateful night by two thieves dressed as policemen. And this is the biggest museum robbery in US history.
Two masterpieces deserve special lamentation. The first one is Vermeer's "Concert", which cost (two hundred million dollars) allows it to be ranked among the most valuable stolen works of art in the world.
Rembrandt's painting "Christ in a storm on the Sea of Galilee"
The second is the only seascape of the great portrait painter Rembrandt "Christ in a storm on the Sea of Galilee". In 2013, the FBI announced that the crime had been solved and the robbers had been identified. But what about this humanity? The canvases have sailed away forever.
A very expensive bastard
On September 2, 1998, a plane flying from New York to Geneva crashed into the Atlantic Ocean while attempting an emergency landing at a Canadian airport. More than two hundred passengers died. It turned out that the on-board system responsible for entertainment (cinema, video games) failed, and a short circuit caused a fire.
"Artist". Painting by Pablo Picasso. 1963 Died in a plane crash in 1998.
The painting by Picasso "The Artist" (1963, one and a half million dollars) was also lost. Did the plane crash by chance, on board of which, in addition, jewels worth a billion dollars "flyed"?
A 20-centimeter part of the painting was found in the water, while the jewels disappeared forever.
Small house fire for 200 million euros
And this story was passed from mouth to mouth two years ago. On October 16, 2012, at three in the morning, seven masterpieces were taken out of the Rotterdam Kunsthal Museum in just two minutes: Pablo Picasso's "Harlequin Head", Henri Matisse's "Reading Girl", "Waterloo Bridge" and "Charing Cross Bridge" by Claude Monet, " Girl in front of an open window" by Paul Gauguin, "Self-portrait" by Meyer de Hahn and "Woman with closed eyes" by Lucian Freud (total cost up to 200 million euros).
The trail led the Dutch police to Romania, where in 2013 they began to detain the participants in the robbery of the century.
In this place, one of the 7 stolen paintings hung on the wall. (AP Photo)
One of the six accused of stealing paintings from the Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam, Radu Dogaru.
Olga Dogaru, the old mother of one of the kidnappers, after the arrest of her son, buried material evidence - stolen paintings - in the village cemetery. Later, she decided to deal with the material evidence much more radically - she burned them in an oven.
The ash contained traces of paint and primer (lead, zinc, copper blue), canvas, and century-old nails. The world was shocked. Ignorance has never served art. But to get to this...
Fluffy Jesus
However, there are also anecdotal stories. So, another old woman, Spaniard Cecilia Jimenez, an 80-year-old parishioner of the Church of Mercy in the city of Borja in Zaragoza, with the permission of the rector, restored the fresco of the early twentieth century “Ecce Homo” (“Behold the Man”) by the artist Elias Garcia Martinez.
She did it so unprofessionally and ugly that the half-meter face of Jesus is now called "Ecce Mono" ("Behold the monkey") or "Fluffy Jesus." Thanks to the Internet, the event received such publicity in the world in just a couple of days that tourists are now specially wrapped in Borhu to gawk at the attraction. The fresco has been fenced off, and the church charges a fee to view it.
And if at first everyone was indignant and demanded that the painting be returned to its former appearance, today the residents of Borja, proud of the world's attention, admitted that Cecilia's work is much more interesting than the original original. She is declared a primitive artist and is seriously compared with Munch and Modigliani.
But here's what's interesting - Cecilia Jimenez is now demanding that the church share with her the income from tourist visits, that is, deduct "author's" for this strange performance. Quite in the spirit of our times.
Andrey Arder
We cannot even imagine how many world masterpieces perished in fires, floods, wars, simply by thoughtlessness. At best, it has settled in private collections. Let's take a look at a small part
Leda and the swan. Artist Michelangelo. OK. 1530 copy of Rosso Fiorentino
"Leda" dissolved in the royal chambers
Around 1530, Michelangelo painted the painting “Leda and the Swan” on an iconographic plot: the wife of the Spartan king Tyndareus is seduced by Zeus who turned into a swan.
A friend and student of the artist Antonio Mini took her to France. Soon "Leda" ended up in the royal palace of Fontainebleau, where her trace disappeared forever. We can judge her only by a pale copy of the Red Florentine - the artist Rosso Fiorentino, who served at the court of Francis the First.
Something similar happened with “Leda and the Swan” by Leonardo da Vinci: only a picturesque copy made by his student Cesare da Sesto remained from the picture.
Too scary devilish wind
Russian battle painter Vasily Vereshchagin (1842–1904) is a special article for researchers. It is believed that many of his paintings have disappeared - such were the conditions in which they were created from nature.
But where the chilling picture “The suppression of the Indian uprising by the British” disappeared is unknown.
In 1874-1876 and in 1882 Vereshchagin made two trips to India. He planned to create a series of paintings on the history of the brutal conquest and oppression of India by the British. On the canvas - the execution of peasants who rebelled against the colonialists. The method of execution was called "devil's wind". From the memoirs of Vereshchagin: “The guns, how many of them happen in number, line up in a row, slowly bring to each muzzle and tie one more or less criminal Indian citizen of different ages, professions and castes by the elbows, and then, on command, all the guns fire at once” . The execution was all the more terrible for the Hindus because, according to their beliefs, the soul and body, literally torn to shreds, could no longer be reborn.
Among the condemned are old peasants, who embody irresistible spiritual strength. In terms of content, this is one of the most powerful paintings in the history of world painting.
In 1887 the painting was exhibited in London and caused a storm of protest; the artist, whom it is pointless to suspect of distorting reality, was threatened with a lawsuit. However, ordinary Londoners understood that everything was so. And the picture simply disappeared from the exhibition under unclear circumstances. Only numerous copies remain of it.
Sketch for "Composition No. 2". Artist Wassily Kandinsky. 1910 The painting itself was burned by the Nazis in Paris in 1942.
In which fire did Kandinsky burn?
Perhaps the greatest damage (largely intentional) to art was caused by the 20th century, its wars and dictatorships.
By 1937, German Propaganda Minister Goebbels confiscated from 32 museums and ordered that 650 examples of "degenerate" ("Jewish-Bolshevik") art be exhibited at once. This was the name now given to modernist works that did not meet the tastes of Hitler and "representing a danger to the Aryan nation." The remarkable vernissage included paintings by Marc Chagall, Oskar Kokoschka, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, El Lissitzky, Emil Nolde, Max Ernst. In total, 16,558 works of art were confiscated! Some of them were sold at auctions in Switzerland, but more than a thousand were burned, and most were scattered around the Berlin cellars, where they were found in 1945.
In 1942, paintings by Picasso, Dali, Miró, Léger, Klee, Ernst were burned in the garden of the National Gallery of Jeu-de-Paume (Paris). Among the masterpieces destroyed by the Nazis are three works from Wassily Kandinsky's "Compositions" series. We know one from a sketch, the other from a photograph.
In 1945, the retreating Nazis set fire to the Schloss Immendorf museum, where a private Viennese collection of 14 paintings by the world's most expensive artist, the Austrian symbolist Gustav Klimt, was deposited. Did they die forever in the flames? Or were saved and now decorate someone's luxurious salons? Maybe someday we'll find out.
During the Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945, a shell destroyed a car carrying over a hundred paintings from the Dresden Gallery to the Königstein Fortress, where they were supposed to be hidden. One of them is Gustave Courbet's Stonebreakers, a painting that rocked the Paris Salon of 1850.
Stone crushers. Artist Gustav Courbet. 1849 The painting was destroyed during the bombing of Dresden in 1945.
During the fire of the Second World War, Van Gogh's painting "The Artist on the Way to Tarascon" (1888) burned down (or, again, on the sly was stolen from the Magdeburg Museum). It is all the more valuable because it is a self-portrait, where Van Gogh depicted himself weaving along the road with all the usual accessories for an artist.
In 1945, in Berlin, during a fire in bunkers in the Friedrichshain district, where paintings from Berlin museums were collected, Caravaggio's Portrait of a Courtesan burned down. The fire then forever destroyed at least 400 more works by Rubens, Goya, Cranach, Jordaens, van Dyck.
Pigs for seed
Caravaggio, the greatest reformer of painting of the 17th century, in fact, the founder of realism, generally suffered more than once.
In 1969, in Palermo, his painting "Nativity with Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence" was taken out of the chapel of San Lorenzo.
The stolen canvas was handed over to the Pullara mafia family, who kept it in completely unsuitable conditions. "Christmas" was gnawed at by pigs and rats for a long time. In the end, the "owners" decided to just burn it. The version is reliable (one recruited mafia told about the fate of the painting), but it is so tragic that it is very difficult to come to terms with it: Caravaggio's painting is still in first place in the list of stolen Italian masterpieces and in third place in the world ranking.
Virgin with a knife
Lost icons in history are countless. One of the latest high-profile cases was the theft of the Andronikovskaya Icon of the Mother of God from Vyshny Volochyok in 1984. The icon was a Greek copy of the beginning of the 14th century, was the home shrine of the Byzantine emperor Andronicus III Palaiologos (the name is in honor of him) and was considered miraculous. Andronicus donated it to the Greek monastery of Monemvasia. In the 19th century, the abbot fled from the Turks with the icon to the city of Patras. He bequeathed it to his relative, the Russian Consul General N.I. Vlassopoulo, and even the son of that in 1839 sent her from Athens to St. Petersburg to Emperor Nikolai Pavlovich. The Andronikov icon migrated in a complicated way to the Winter Palace, then to the Trinity Cathedral. In 1877 she was transferred to the Convent of Our Lady of Kazan near Vyshny Volochok.
After the irretrievable loss of this ancient shrine, only its copy (miraculous) has been preserved. On the neck of the Virgin there is an image of a bleeding wound inflicted by a Turk. At the bottom of the original icon was a case with a Damascus steel knife - a striking weapon. But for the robbers, the small size of the icon, 25×35 cm, most likely played a decisive role.
Where is Rembrandt's only seascape?
In 1990, the private art gallery of the famous philanthropist Isabella Stewart Gardner was robbed in Boston, who collected 2,500 pieces of European art. Thirteen of them were carried out on the fateful night by two thieves dressed as policemen. And this is the biggest museum robbery in US history.
Two masterpieces deserve special lamentation. The first is Vermeer's "Concert", which, worth two hundred million dollars, makes it one of the most valuable stolen works of art in the world.
The second is the only seascape by the great portrait painter Rembrandt “Christ in a storm on the Sea of Galilee”. In 2013, the FBI announced that the crime had been solved and the robbers had been identified. But what about this humanity? The canvases have sailed away forever.
Artist. Painting by Pablo Picasso. 1963 Died in a plane crash in 1998.
A very expensive bastard
On September 2, 1998, a plane flying from New York to Geneva crashed into the Atlantic Ocean while attempting an emergency landing at a Canadian airport. More than two hundred passengers died. It turned out that the on-board system responsible for entertainment (cinema, video games) failed, and a short circuit caused a fire. The painting by Picasso "The Artist" (1963, one and a half million dollars) was also lost. Did the plane crash by chance, on board of which, in addition, jewels worth a billion dollars "flyed"?
A 20-centimeter part of the painting was found in the water, while the jewels disappeared forever.
Small house fire for 200 million euros
And this story was passed from mouth to mouth two years ago. On October 16, 2012, at three in the morning, seven masterpieces were taken out of the Rotterdam Kunsthal Museum in just two minutes: Pablo Picasso's "Harlequin Head", Henri Matisse's "Reading Girl", "Waterloo Bridge" and "Charing Cross Bridge" by Claude Monet, " Girl in front of an open window" by Paul Gauguin, "Self-portrait" by Meyer de Hahn and "Woman with closed eyes" by Lucian Freud (total cost up to 200 million euros).
The trail led the Dutch police to Romania, where in 2013 they began to detain the participants in the robbery of the century.
Olga Dogaru, the old mother of one of the kidnappers, after her son's arrest in January, buried material evidence - stolen paintings - in the village cemetery. In February, she decided to deal with material evidence much more radically - she burned them in an oven.
The ash contained traces of paint and primer (lead, zinc, copper blue), canvas, and century-old nails. The world was shocked. Ignorance has never served art. But to get to this...
Fluffy Jesus
However, there are also anecdotal stories. So, recently, another old woman, Spaniard Cecilia Jimenez, an 80-year-old parishioner of the Church of Mercy in the city of Borja in Zaragoza, with the permission of the rector, restored the fresco of the early twentieth century “Ecce Homo” (“Behold the Man”) by the artist Elias Garcia Martinez.
She did it so unprofessionally and ugly that the half-meter face of Jesus is now called "Ecce Mono" ("Behold the monkey") or "Fluffy Jesus." Thanks to the Internet, the event received such publicity in the world in just a couple of days that tourists are now specially wrapped in Borhu to gawk at the attraction. The fresco has been fenced off, and the church charges a fee to view it.
And if at first everyone was indignant and demanded that the painting be returned to its former appearance, today the residents of Borja, proud of the world's attention, admitted that Cecilia's work is much more interesting than the original original. She is declared a primitive artist and is seriously compared with Munch and Modigliani.
But here's what's interesting - Cecilia Jimenez now demands that the church share with her the income from tourist visits, that is, deduct "author's" for this strange performance. Quite in the spirit of our times.
Andrey Arder
We cannot even imagine how many world masterpieces perished in fires, floods, wars, simply by thoughtlessness. At best, it has settled in private collections. Let's take a look at a small part...
"Leda" dissolved in the royal chambers
Around 1530, Michelangelo painted the painting “Leda and the Swan” on an iconographic plot: the wife of the Spartan king Tyndareus is seduced by Zeus who turned into a swan.
Leda and the swan. Artist Michelangelo. OK. 1530 copy of Rosso Fiorentino
A friend and student of the artist Antonio Mini took her to France. Soon "Leda" ended up in the royal palace of Fontainebleau, where her trace disappeared forever. We can judge her only by a pale copy of the Red Florentine - the artist Rosso Fiorentino, who served at the court of Francis the First.
Something similar happened with “Leda and the Swan” by Leonardo da Vinci: only a picturesque copy made by his student Cesare da Sesto remained from the picture.
Too scary devilish wind
Russian battle painter Vasily Vereshchagin (1842-1904) - a special article for researchers. It is believed that many of his paintings have disappeared - such were the conditions in which they were created from nature.
But where the chilling picture “The suppression of the Indian uprising by the British” disappeared is unknown.
In 1874-1876 and in 1882 Vereshchagin made two trips to India. He planned to create a series of paintings on the history of the brutal conquest and oppression of India by the British. On the canvas - the execution of peasants who rebelled against the colonialists. The method of execution was called "devil's wind".
V. Vereshchagin "The suppression of the Indian uprising by the British."
From the memoirs of Vereshchagin: “The guns, how many of them happen in number, line up in a row, slowly bring to each muzzle and tie one more or less criminal Indian citizen of different ages, professions and castes by the elbows, and then, on command, all the guns fire at once” . The execution was all the more terrible for the Hindus because, according to their beliefs, the soul and body, literally torn to shreds, could no longer be reborn.
Among the condemned are old peasants, who embody irresistible spiritual strength. In terms of content, this is one of the most powerful paintings in the history of world painting.
In 1887 the painting was exhibited in London and caused a storm of protest; the artist, whom it is pointless to suspect of distorting reality, was threatened with a lawsuit. However, ordinary Londoners understood that everything was so. And the picture simply disappeared from the exhibition under unclear circumstances. Only numerous copies remain of it.
In which fire did Kandinsky burn?
Perhaps the greatest damage (largely intentional) to art was caused by the 20th century, its wars and dictatorships.
By 1937, German Propaganda Minister Goebbels confiscated from 32 museums and ordered that 650 examples of "degenerate" ("Jewish-Bolshevik") art be exhibited at once. This was the name now given to modernist works that did not meet the tastes of Hitler and "representing a danger to the Aryan nation."
Sketch for "Composition No. 2". Artist Wassily Kandinsky. 1910 The painting itself was burned by the Nazis in Paris in 1942.
The remarkable vernissage included paintings by Marc Chagall, Oskar Kokoschka, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, El Lissitzky, Emil Nolde, Max Ernst. In total, 16,558 works of art were confiscated! Some of them were sold at auctions in Switzerland, but more than a thousand were burned, and most were scattered around the Berlin cellars, where they were found in 1945.
In 1942, paintings by Picasso, Dali, Miró, Léger, Klee, Ernst were burned in the garden of the National Gallery of Jeu-de-Paume (Paris). Among the masterpieces destroyed by the Nazis are three works from Wassily Kandinsky's "Compositions" series. We know one from a sketch, the other from a photograph.
In 1945, the retreating Nazis set fire to the Schloss Immendorf museum, where a private Viennese collection of 14 paintings by the world's most expensive artist, the Austrian symbolist Gustav Klimt, was deposited. Did they die forever in the flames? Or were saved and now decorate someone's luxurious salons? Maybe someday we'll find out.
During the Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945, a shell destroyed a car carrying over a hundred paintings from the Dresden Gallery to the Königstein Fortress, where they were supposed to be hidden. One of them is Gustave Courbet's The Stone Crushers, a painting that rocked the Paris Salon of 1850.
"Stone Breakers" Artist Gustav Courbet. 1849 The painting was destroyed during the bombing of Dresden in 1945.
During the fire of the Second World War, Van Gogh's painting "The Artist on the Way to Tarascon" (1888) burned down (or, again, on the sly was stolen from the Magdeburg Museum). It is all the more valuable because it is a self-portrait, where Van Gogh depicted himself weaving along the road with all the usual accessories for an artist.
In 1945, in Berlin, during a fire in bunkers in the Friedrichshain district, where paintings from Berlin museums were collected, Caravaggio's Portrait of a Courtesan burned down. The fire then forever destroyed at least 400 more works by Rubens, Goya, Cranach, Jordaens, van Dyck.
Pigs for seed
Caravaggio, the greatest reformer of painting of the 17th century, in fact, the founder of realism, generally suffered more than once.
In 1969, in Palermo, his painting "Nativity with Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence" was taken out of the chapel of San Lorenzo.
Michelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio. "Christmas with Saint Lawrence and Saint Francis"
The stolen canvas was handed over to the Pullara mafia family, who kept it in completely unsuitable conditions. "Christmas" was gnawed at by pigs and rats for a long time. In the end, the "owners" decided to just burn it. The version is reliable (one recruited mafia told about the fate of the painting), but it is so tragic that it is very difficult to come to terms with it: Caravaggio's painting is still in first place in the list of stolen Italian masterpieces and in third place in the world ranking.
Virgin with a knife
Lost icons in history are countless. One of the latest high-profile cases was the theft of the Andronikovskaya Icon of the Mother of God from Vyshny Volochyok in 1984. The icon was a Greek copy of the beginning of the 14th century, was the home shrine of the Byzantine emperor Andronicus III Palaiologos (the name is in honor of him) and was considered miraculous. Andronicus donated it to the Greek monastery of Monemvasia.
In the 19th century, the abbot fled from the Turks with the icon to the city of Patras. He bequeathed it to his relative, the Russian Consul General N.I. Vlassopoulo, and even the son of that in 1839 sent her from Athens to St. Petersburg to Emperor Nikolai Pavlovich. The Andronikov icon migrated in a complicated way to the Winter Palace, then to the Trinity Cathedral. In 1877 she was transferred to the Convent of Our Lady of Kazan near Vyshny Volochok.
After the irretrievable loss of this ancient shrine, only its copy (miraculous) has been preserved. On the neck of the Virgin there is an image of a bleeding wound inflicted by a Turk. At the bottom of the original icon was a case with a Damascus steel knife - a striking weapon. But for the robbers, the small size of the icon, 25 × 35 cm, most likely played a decisive role.
Where is Rembrandt's only seascape?
In 1990, the private art gallery of the famous philanthropist Isabella Stewart Gardner was robbed in Boston, who collected 2,500 pieces of European art. Thirteen of them were carried out on the fateful night by two thieves dressed as policemen. And this is the biggest museum robbery in US history.
Two masterpieces deserve special lamentation. The first one is Vermeer's "Concert", which cost (two hundred million dollars) allows it to be ranked among the most valuable stolen works of art in the world.
Rembrandt's painting "Christ in a storm on the Sea of Galilee"
The second is the only seascape of the great portrait painter Rembrandt "Christ in a storm on the Sea of Galilee". In 2013, the FBI announced that the crime had been solved and the robbers had been identified. But what about this humanity? The canvases have sailed away forever.
A very expensive bastard
On September 2, 1998, a plane flying from New York to Geneva crashed into the Atlantic Ocean while attempting an emergency landing at a Canadian airport. More than two hundred passengers died. It turned out that the on-board system responsible for entertainment (cinema, video games) failed, and a short circuit caused a fire.
"Artist". Painting by Pablo Picasso. 1963 Died in a plane crash in 1998.
The painting by Picasso "The Artist" (1963, one and a half million dollars) was also lost. Did the plane crash by chance, on board of which, in addition, jewels worth a billion dollars "flyed"?
A 20-centimeter part of the painting was found in the water, while the jewels disappeared forever.
Small house fire for 200 million euros
And this story was passed from mouth to mouth two years ago. On October 16, 2012, at three in the morning, seven masterpieces were taken out of the Rotterdam Kunsthal Museum in just two minutes: Pablo Picasso's "Harlequin Head", Henri Matisse's "Reading Girl", "Waterloo Bridge" and "Charing Cross Bridge" by Claude Monet, " Girl in front of an open window" by Paul Gauguin, "Self-portrait" by Meyer de Hahn and "Woman with closed eyes" by Lucian Freud (total cost up to 200 million euros).
The trail led the Dutch police to Romania, where in 2013 they began to detain the participants in the robbery of the century.
In this place, one of the 7 stolen paintings hung on the wall. (AP Photo)
One of the six accused of stealing paintings from the Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam, Radu Dogaru.
Olga Dogaru, the old mother of one of the kidnappers, after the arrest of her son, buried material evidence - stolen paintings - in the village cemetery. Later, she decided to deal with the material evidence much more radically - she burned them in an oven.
The ash contained traces of paint and primer (lead, zinc, copper blue), canvas, and century-old nails. The world was shocked. Ignorance has never served art. But to get to this...
Fluffy Jesus
However, there are also anecdotal stories. So, another old woman, Spaniard Cecilia Jimenez, an 80-year-old parishioner of the Church of Mercy in the city of Borja in Zaragoza, with the permission of the rector, restored the fresco of the early twentieth century “Ecce Homo” (“Behold the Man”) by the artist Elias Garcia Martinez.
She did it so unprofessionally and ugly that the half-meter face of Jesus is now called "Ecce Mono" ("Behold the monkey") or "Fluffy Jesus." Thanks to the Internet, the event received such publicity in the world in just a couple of days that tourists are now specially wrapped in Borhu to gawk at the attraction. The fresco has been fenced off, and the church charges a fee to view it.
And if at first everyone was indignant and demanded that the painting be returned to its former appearance, today the residents of Borja, proud of the world's attention, admitted that Cecilia's work is much more interesting than the original original. She is declared a primitive artist and is seriously compared with Munch and Modigliani.
But here's what's interesting - Cecilia Jimenez is now demanding that the church share with her the income from tourist visits, that is, deduct "author's" for this strange performance. Quite in the spirit of our times.
Andrey Arder
