Five stone inlaid tabletops were selected for the project from the Furniture collection of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. These tabletops were not previously studied or exhibited in the museum.
The aim of the project is research of this group of inlaid tops, clarification of their attribution and origin, as well as restoration and conservation of the objects.
The project will result in publications and an exhibition. In addition, the possibility of including these objects in the permanent exhibition of decorative art, which is planned to open in the new building of the museum, the Old Masters Gallery, is an option.
As the project progresses, the information on the website will be updated.
The origins of inlaid tabletops
Five inlaid tabletops entered the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts as part of the so-called transferred art collection after World War II. No additional information about the previous location of these objects was specified in the documents. In 2018, attempts were made to find information, which were successful and led to the launch of this project.
Thanks to the additional registration numbers in the surviving archive lists in the Manuscripts department of the Pushkin State Museum it was possible to find a note made by the curator E.I. Rotenberg, who received the valuable cargo from Germany in July - September 1946. He noted on the margins that the incoming boxes supposedly contained the collection of the Dresden Historical Museum [Rustkammer - I.S.], and some may have contained items from the Green Vault and the Porcelain Collection. It was possible to clarify after unpacking, but neither the lists nor the subsequent reception documents had any more notes.
The findings led to the international website www.lostart.de, which published some of the artifacts lost or displaced during the Nazi regime and as a result of World War II. Unfortunately, on this website, works of decorative art are often published without photographs, making it virtually impossible to match the name to an actual object. But we were lucky, the Green Vault’s search list contained photos of two of the five tables in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts' collection. The other three were easy to match to the descriptions in terms of sizes and some features of the depicted scenes.
According to the Green Vault’s inventory of 1879, the mosaics were exhibited in the Fireplace Room. The 1839 guide Le Grüne Gewölbe à Dresde, ou Trésor Royal d'Objets Précieux says about the so-called Florentine mosaics, including tabletops, that they are magnificent and complex works of art, but nothing else is known about them.
The Green Vault (Grünes Gewölbe) is a treasure trove of Saxon rulers and one of the most famous and luxurious kunstkammer. The history of the collection began in 1560, for several centuries it was actively supplemented by the best works from different parts of Europe. The Green Vault, previously accessible only to a narrow circle of rulers and nobles of the highest rank, in 1729 became the first open treasure museum in the world.
In 1938, in order to preserve the collection of the Green Vault, the employees of the museum took the entire collection outside Dresden to Königstein Fortress. The collection of the Dresden Gallery came almost the same way. On May 14, 1945 the Soviet Army transported the entire collection of the Green Vault from Königstein Fortress to the Pillnitz Palace. Then almost everything that was in Pillnitz was sent to the USSR. Due to its great value, the collection was first sent to the People's Commissariat of Finance and then distributed among several institutions. About 2.5 thousand works of art from the Green Vault were received by the Pushkin State Museum.
As is known, in 1958 the USSR returned 1.6 million items to the GDR, of which 600 thousand were returned to Dresden (previously, in 1955, 750 works of art were returned to the Dresden Gallery). In particular, 120 items were transferred from the furniture collection of the Pushkin State Museum, of which 44 were transferred to the Green Vault. We can assume that what was left in the Pushkin Museum at random was not reflected in any of the lists with which representatives of the German and Soviet sides worked when transferring the collections (it is possible that there were no complete lists at all). Or tables could have been indicated in the lists, which in fact was not the case, as only inlaid plates were taken out of the Pillnitz Palace.
Unfortunately, during the most difficult transportation and because of the prolonged storage in unheated rooms and outside all the tabletops decayed, as did the adhesive connecting the mosaics with their bases, and two tabletops were broken. According to the inspection report № 47 from September 18, 1946 in the State Museum of Fine Arts, the broken tops were in two different boxes, and the committee left the following comment about each of them: "In the [box] description by of the People's Commissariat of Finance it is not mentioned that the lid is broken. It should be noted that the packaging of this box was unsatisfactory: the boards fixing the lid were too thin and badly nailed, and there were not enough wood shavings".
All the facts stated above are just the beginning of the work to restore the entire history of the five magnificent mosaics, which we are now honored to keep and plan to show to the public in the future.