Language: Russian [with English subtitles]

Syntez–Integra film production company in association with the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and with the support of Stella Art Foundation presents a full-length documentary, The Ideal Museum. Renaissance Rediscovered centered around the story of works of art damaged in wartime more than seventy years ago and brought back to life today.

The filmmakers focus on the provenance and history of rescuing and restoring a Renaissance sculpture collection transferred from Berlin to Moscow in 1946 as a result of the Second World War and dubbed as the Donatello Project.

In May 1945, during the Battle of Berlin, a fire broke out in the bunker of the Friedrichshain flak tower, destroying several paintings by Caravaggio, Rubens, and Botticelli. Sculptures by prominent Italian Renaissance masters, such as Donatello and Verrocchio, were also accounted for as irreparably lost. More than seventy years later, it was discovered that the collection of sculptures had been rescued. Their charred fragments were found in the bunker by Soviet archaeologists and restorers and transferred to the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts for storage.

The film features unique footage from restoration workshops of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, showcasing the workflow of restorers and researchers committed to restoring the sculptures severely damaged in the fire. Join our film crew as they visit a nuclear reactor facility to learn about unique joint research programs of the Pushkin Museum and the National Research Center ‘Kurchatov Institute’. Curators of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and the State Hermitage Museum share unknown facts about the extraordinary effort of their colleagues in the 1950s to rescue and return the collections of sculptures and paintings to Germany, without which Dresden’s Gemäldegalerie and the Museum Island in Berlin would not exist today.

The filming took place in museum storage facilities and workshops of Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Berlin, and Florence. The film also features unique documentary film and photography of the 1940s–1950s from the archives of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the State Hermitage Museum, and the Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive, most of which are made public for the first time.

What did it take for museum workers from different countries to team up in their effort to restore works of art created in Italy and divided between Germany and Russia? Can multiple institutions take proper care of one art collection at the same time? Can there possibly be an ‘ideal museum’ that exists outside time and space, featuring exhibits that are cultural heritage of the whole mankind?

Leading experts in the field of preservation of world cultural heritage, including researchers and restorers of the Bode Museum (Berlin, Germany), the directors of the Uffizi Gallery and the Museo Nazionale del Bargello (Florence, Italy), reflect on these questions and seek answers to them.

As part of the film production, contemporary artist Francesco Pignatelli (Italy) created a special video installation that brings together music composed by Maestro Leonardo Benazzi (Italy), metaphorical images of an ‘ideal museum’, and sculptures restored at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts: John the Baptist, Dancing Cupid, Lamentation of Christ.

The project was implemented in partnership with Stella Art Foundation, providing an opportunity to rethink art of the past through their experience in organizing expositions in Old Masters’ art exhibition rooms of the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienna), the Ca' Rezzonico Museum (Venice), and the Louvre (Paris) curated by Boris Manner.

The filmmakers wish to extend their gratitude for assistance in the making of this film to: the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Stella Art Foundation, the Embassy of Germany in Moscow, the Embassy of Italy in Moscow, OOO Knauf GIPS.

The première was held during the Apriti Cinema festival in the Uffizi Galleries in June 2023.

Credits
Screenplay: Ekaterina Pronko, Elena Chernyak, Tatyana Semyonova
Directors: Ivan Bolotnikov, Fedor Pronko
Music: Leonardo Benazzi
Producers: Elena Chernyak, Sergey Butkov