Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery on Monday unveiled Ilya Repin’s 19th-century masterpiece of Ivan the Terrible after nearly seven years of painstaking and pioneering restoration work.
“Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan” was ripped in three places when an intoxicated museum visitor attacked it with a metal pole in May 2018. The man, who said he was upset over the painting’s “falsification of historical facts,” was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for “damaging a work of great cultural value.”
Tretyakov Gallery set up a restoration workshop on site with a specially designed table that allowed its team to work on the delicate painting with precision from every angle.
“The unique equipment has no parallels in the world,” the Tretyakov Gallery said in a statement. “The specialists managed to not only repair the damages but also discover the true colors lost over time.”
Repin’s restored 1885 painting went on display Monday at an exhibition showing each stage of restoration work, as well as the history of the canvas’s creation.
“The work is highly protected: it’s now exhibited in a specially designed climatic vandal-proof capsule,” Tretyakov Gallery said.
In 1913, “Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan” was slashed by an iconographer, an attack that Repin himself blamed on the growing influence of modern art movements.
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